High Roads and Low (formerly The Long Road Home)
by AughraOfEarth
Summary: Sequel to "That First of Days After"...which ended with Snow and Eric agreeing to part for a year and a day, in the interests of securing each other's safety in the uncertain new world they'd created. The most certain thing to say is that at the end of it all, they will end up together. I just don't plan on making it easy. OH, COME ON. WHERE WOULD BE THE FUN IN THAT?
1. Prologue Ch 01 - Coronation Day

**Prologue**

In the sanctuary of the Aos Si, Mab's oracle raised her head, and turned to stare at the child acolyte who stood at the foot of the steps, below the Pool of Vision.

"The Black Queen is fallen," she said, "her iron crown to the furnace, her body to the pyre. A maiden sits upon a throne twice hers, once stolen, and the destiny of both her realm and ours may rest on the use she makes of power she does not yet know she possesses."

She paused. "Tell our lady," she said, and the girl turned and ran.

**Chapter 1 – Coronation Day**

When the cathedral doors were thrown open, Eric stepped back from the sunlit aisle where he had stood and twitched his hood forward over his head. Then, ducking a little to hide his height, he slipped into the edge the crowd as it began to spill out and down the wide gallery towards the forecourt stairs.

As soon as he passed those doors himself, he dropped back into their shadow and made his way at a fast walk along the narrow gallery that led beside the towering hall next door, leading into the second courtyard. Down the stairs then, and across the yard swiftly as he could go.

It was the work of moments only to get his Dane-ax and the belt with his hand axes from the corner under the bed where he'd slept the previous night. He left one of the small gold coins from his purse on the bed, for his hosts—family, he supposed now, so far as he might say he had any. Then back across the court for a brief visit to the castle kitchen, where he collected a loaf, cheese, and a few links of dried sausage into his pockets from one of the trays the scullions were now setting in order to be borne up shortly to the hall, and he was ready to leave.

He crossed back into the forecourt through the south door by the granaries, circling through the throng of common folk now gathering round the foot of the forecourt stairs. Here he had the cover of what was left of the giant trebuchet, the charred ruin of which still sat to the side of those stairs, and he might also thank the enterprise of those who had pulled an arc of wagons around the edges of the crowd, that they might climb up for a better view. He walked faster, as the murmuring of the crowd gave way to cheers among the nobles now lining the staircase three and four deep. A glance told him the knights of the queen's honour guard were descending to space themselves evenly the length of the range, and it could only be moments before Snow White would begin her passage after them.

It was easier than he'd hoped, not to look back as he went. Beyond enough to have been present in the chapel. Unease still tightened his insides at the thought of it: coronations were for the royals and nobility, and even if it had been proclaimed that all men might come to this one who'd borne arms in the attack the day before, that had felt like little enough surety in his case, of any safety. None of anything at all, he suspected, if Duke Hammond had seen him and thought to have him seized. Questioned, as to what had given him the presumption that day before, to push through to the princess' side, and make sure of riding with her that last stretch to the castle gates. That and the sass to flirt a little, and be there to distract her a little from the worry in her eyes at that last step before word was given to begin the assault. He might have had an answer for that—_am I the last man here to remember she's still but a girl, and might well stand knowing herself not alone, at such a time?_—but it would defeat the purpose of their discretion, for that to happen.

_I'd be lucky,_ he thought, _if it didn't end with her havin' to rescue me again._

Neither of them could really afford to be known that far friends.

It had been an uneasy matter too, fearing that either his nerve might yet fail, or hers, if at any point they'd come close enough to see each other this morning. Could he have looked her in the eyes again, and still left? He must, so yes, he could, but he was less sure of how she might take it even now. But hearing no change in the crowd's murmuring as he hastened through the open gate, he was confident she would not see him go.

And then it was as he'd imagined yesterday: off up the slope towards the village, into the brightness of a sparkling spring day. No better time than this, to try going home.

The village was as deserted as he'd expected. No question every last soul would be gone down to the castle this morning, by any means they could get there. It was deserted enough that he could even risk passing by the house where he had formerly rented a room, to collect the last of his things before moving on, steadily, towards the edge of town.

At least, it was deserted until he passed the ruin of the gatehouse that had once stood over the main road into town, and a cheery voice said, "Well, ahah! About time you were along, lad!"

"Jeff?" He pulled up short and swung round to find Anna's husband stepped out beaming from where he had been lounging against what was left of the gate. Ready for travel, from the pack slung across his shoulders, and the staff in his good hand, and not alone either, for behind him a smaller man in a monk's kirtle led a modestly laden mule.

"What the devil are you doing here?" Eric backed up as the pair proceeded into the road beside him.

"Well, waitin' for you, aren't we?" Jeff stepped past, giving him a sharp eye sideways, and his companion paused with a smaller, tightish smile. "Waitin' for you to be done sayin' good-bye to our new queen, who I'm guessing you've seen crowned now, and come on along—"

"Jeff, I've no plans but to be goin' on alone."

"Well, plans are great things aren't they, but how often do they come out as planned?" Jeff gestured towards his companion. "This here's Brother Anthony, by the way. He's a friend of mine down from the library at Hammond's, come to see we neither of us come to any harm, and because he's got an interest in stories."

"Aye." Eric gave the shorter man a curt nod. "Then he's missed the one that matters today, though if you were to hop on that mule, Brother, and trot it back to the castle, you might still see some of it."

"Oh, there'll be enough witnesses to that one," said the little man brightly, "and Master Ambrose there to draw pictures as it happens. I'd sooner be around for things most won't see."

"Like me walkin' off over the hills by myself," said Eric. He met Jeff's cheerful gaze, a touch more grim. "I mean it, Jeff. You've no business being anywhere right now, but back there in that crowd with Anna beside you,"

"Oo, no, there you're wrong." Jeff leaned the staff into his shoulder, and reached with his good hand to shift his injured arm in its sling. "I'm no' fond of crowds at the best of times, and as I can't enjoy myself playin' music with the rest afterwards at our new queen's party, I've already told my girl I'd as soon come along and see to you." He paused. "You're going to need me, lad, to get away from here, you know. I'm the one as knows the watchword you'll have to give the riders patrolling by the road up ahead, because it happens to be the Duke's order that none may leave this place without it, for the next three days."

"What?"

"You notice the bells aren't ringing, either."

He hadn't, but Jeff was right. He might have expected bells, and from the other's nod, his face must have shown his surprise. "That's right. Her Majesty's order, and the Duke's. You can bet she's asking that crowd right now, to help her keep all this quiet a few days yet.

"That might be the biggest castle in the country, but it's only one," Jeff went on, "and there are plenty more, a good few near as large, that the Black Queen's men still hold." He laid a finger alongside his nose. "The longer we can keep it from any of them, that she no longer rules, the easier it'll be to get them back."

"Aye." Eric considered him, then nodded. "If any get their gates shut, it'll take more than the Duke's army to winkle them out."

Jeff pointed to a rider now approaching along the road from the forest. "Hence my friend Ollie and a dozen or two like him, riding patrol back and forth, with an archer or two in the bushes, to go with each one." Jeff smiled. "Or more." He laughed, when Eric stared at him. "Or less. D'ye think I should tell ye the truth of it, even if I knew?" He waved, and the horseman dropped his lance point aside, as they closed on each other. "Eh, Ollie! Havin' a busy day yet?"

"No more'n in a graveyard at midnight," said the horseman, bringing his horse to a stop. "So, Jeff, have ye a word for me, then?"

"Angelus," said Jeff. "For the first of the bells you haven't heard ringing this past hour."

"That'll do," Ollie nodded. "Coronation's done, then?"

"Aye." Jeff jerked a thumb at Eric. "Now Brother Anthony and I are just seein' Eric here home for a day or two, but we'll all be back by Sunday."

"Na," said Eric. "They'll be back, but I won't."

"An' we can talk about that as we go," said Jeff, and patted him at the shoulder. "Come along now an' leave our man to watchin' for no one more, we'll hope."

"At least tell me this wasn't Her Majesty's idea," Eric said, as they continued on into the woodland, and he began to look for signs of the old trail towards the western coast. "I'd expect she'd mind her word better than that."

"It's no'," said Jeff. "I've had no word from her in any of this. Nor had my Anna, when she put me up to it."

Eric favoured him with a skeptical eye. "When did she do that?"

"Oh, sometime round that hour in the night after we'd both enough sleep to do us a while, and no one else was stirrin'—an' for what it's worth, when she suggested it, I asked!—_'now, would it be that nice young girl you've been tending, has put you up to such an idea_?'—and she said no, and I believe her."

"An' then I'll wager she distracted you from askin' any further questions," said Eric, and Jeff grinned evilly.

"No!—she'd already done that." He laughed when Eric looked round at him. "Eh, lad, you don't think we were awake at midnight t'be talking about _you_, do you? With neither of us having seen the other since mid-winter, I should say not! We'd better to do, an' made fine distraction of it, by the time we got round to the matter of it bein' a few days before we might see as much of each other again."

"An' why should that be?"

"Because she'll be sticking close to Her New Majesty a few days, until she sees she has more than green girls to mind her! Young Greta and the two we're leavin' from our village, Catherine and Lisl, they'll do well enough to do anythin' she says, but they've no more sense than she of what's proper to her state. Not that Anna can say she's any great sense of it, either—but at least as a married woman with a few years on all of 'em, she can keep 'em out of too much mischief."

"Huh." Mischief as such wouldn't have been his first expectation of Snow White, but that might only be Anna's word for it. He shook his head and pushed on through the branches.

"What? You don't think she'll have the gift for it?" Jeff asked, following him.

"No!" Eric didn't look back. "She—" he stopped, then, and did. "She'll not try to, Jeff, she's a good lass as far as that goes. It's just she gets distracted an' wanders off a lot. Mostly, unless she's got a bee in her bonnet about anything in particular, she'll look first to see what anyone else wants of her."

"Eh, well, that's most of what Anna said." Jeff turned to hold branches aside, as Anthony led the mule along behind them. "That she'd be a good girl an' not ask or send after you, as she promised." He dug in with his staff and followed after.

"That still begs the question of why she's sendin' you! Anna, that is," Eric added, as the older man once more caught up with him. The trail was still clear enough, here under the trees, where the bushes were thinner.

"Eh, well, she's not done with you, is she?" Jeff peered pointedly around at his bad side. "She wants you back in a day or two's time, to have another look at that gash in your side, and see it's mendin'. How's that all doing, anyway?"

"Well enough to go on" He sighed, and trudged on. "Hurts, but it's clean, an' dressed tight enough to help."

"Couldn't get your arm up this morning, could you?"

"How'd you know that?" he asked, and Jeff chuckled.

"Your hair's tied back sloppy an' at collar, not crown. After all the pullin' you did yesterday, at that gash in your side, ye couldn't get that hand high enough to catch it higher," he said.

"Doesn't mean I'm goin' back." Eric set his jaw and swung steadily on up the path.

"Does, though, if I don't like the colour of those bandages by nightfall." Jeff dug in with his staff, to keep up with him, and held up a warning finger at his glance. "An' no glowerin' at me about it, ye know it's not ill-meant!"

"No, but it's no' happening," Eric muttered. "I'm no' goin' back."

"An' there's another matter," Jeff went on. "Third day from now, there's a big service planned for the church down by the village. Outside in the churchyard if the weather's fine, wi' the Archbishop presiding, along wi' all his party, an' Her Majesty an' all the lords to hand, to say a memorial mass for all that fell retakin' that castle an' crown. Not a funeral as such, for they'll have 'em all buried by then, but a service and a readin' out of the names for all they can learn names of, our lads and the Black Queen's dead as well, as it's been turning out that more of them have been ours to begin with, than we counted on." He swung his staff out to clear a branch aside. "You need to be there for that service, lad."

"Oh, I don't think so!" Eric said. "They've no need of me, an' you just said it yourself, Her Majesty's to be there."

"As if that were to be any matter for you to be concerned about, you not bein' part of her party!" Pursuing him into the more open ground, Jeff rapped his arm. "Stop a moment, lad." When Eric did, Jeff reached to catch the edge of his hood, and flipped it up over his head again. He pointed an admonishing finger. "Even if it's fine, it'll be a cool day. You but keep that hood up and stay amidst a few of our taller lads, an' she'll never know. Why should she look for you, anyway?"

"She shouldn't! But I shouldn't be there, anyway!" Eric threw the hood back again. "What? Take such a chance for no reason? Risk having anyone who might see me bear any word back to her, of me bein' there? For nothing? For no one else to whom it'll matter?"

"That's the way you think now, an' it needs to be mended!"

"I see no other way I should think!" He shook his head. "There's none to whom it'll matter whether I'm there or not, and if I can get home today, I see no reason why I should march back again tomorrow or a day later, to be there for it."

"Then you might just consider how it may do _you_ some good," said Jeff. His tone edged. "I don't say there's any to whom it should matter, Eric, whether you're there or not. But if you turn down that chance to stand and witness with all of us that were there, what it cost to make it happen, do you think none will ever remember the fact? You think none'll wonder or gossip, about how that adds to all the rest?"

Eric stared at him, his insides going cold. "What're you talking about?!"

Jeff met his look with a grim expression.

"If you want a future in this land, son, on the same footing as every other man who's fought to win its freedom, the least you can do is be seen showing proper respect for those who've given their all for it.

"Fail in so little," he went on, "and you can bet on it being a damn sight easier for all of us who've done better these last ten years, in facing the fact upholding the law weren't the same as upholding the right, to ask how you could miss that fact as long as you did. Until ol' Fate dropped the princess right into your hands, in fact."

"Aye." Eric nodded. "Well, that gives me your measure, then. A righteous man, Jeff, who'd have no free men in your world but those who are righteous. Like you. So I can see I've no chance, have I?" He turned away and pushed on, ignoring the pain in his side, and avoiding the other's gaze. "You'd ha' got on well wi' my father."

"An' that's a problem for you, is it?" Jeff followed, closing on him again. "That righteous men such as I might ask, 'what did you do, while Ravenna ruled?' and think less of you havin' any power to resist, and doin' nothing?"

At that, the cold in him ran hot, and Eric turned on him.

"I've as much right to live in this land as you do, an' be let live, so long as I do obey the law," he said. "If you think to treat every man as wolfshead, who's not done as you an' your friends, or who doesn't think as you—or who doesn't think the sun shines out your arses, either!—you'll have none left but those her rule reduced to slaves."

"That's not answerin' the question, is it?" Jeff slammed the butt of his staff into the ground between them.

"You'd be more convincing, Jeff Bowyer, if your bein' alive to ask that question hadn't more to do with you having sheltered behind Hammond's skirts all these years, than anything else." Eric let his expression slip to a sneer. "Resist Ravenna? She'd no need to care anything for you, with him keeping you an' all the other hotheads safely penned!

"And what kind of decision was it, to leave your families to face the danger? How many women lost did it take, before they saw scarring their faces must be the price of being left alone?"

"You've no right to cast such aspersions, when you never tried to do better!"

Eric glared at him. "Maybe I'd never any better chance, but at least I stood my own ground."

"Like you're doin' now? Runnin' off home to this property of yours, miles from anything, hopin' the world may leave you alone there?" Jeff shook his head. "It's no start, lad, and it's no help for anything your new queen wants for you, either."

_"__Leave her out of it!__"_

"I can't do! She's in it, like it or no!" Again Jeff thumped his staff. "In a year's time, Huntsman, she'll want to see you back! Can you afford to pass up any chance in the meantime, to prove you're worth her knowing?"

"On the terms you'd offer?" Eric shook his head. "With my past hanging forever like a blade over my future? As what you're telling me, is that it always will, here, because you and your friends'll see to it that it does."

"There's a difference between upholding the law, and upholding the right! An' you're dreamin' if you think none will ever now weigh one against t'other, an' ask which you preferred."

"Oh!" he said, voice going rough on him, "I'll no' make that mistake!" He stepped back, momentarily unable to say more, and swept out his ax to block the gesture when Jeff unstepped his staff and followed again. "I expect you and yours will be doing a lot of that," he said. He swung abruptly away, not trusting what more either face or voice might reveal. "It's time for you to go back, now. I've had enough—stood as much of this as I will!"

"Ah," said Jeff, behind him, "well, you're wrong about that, too!" and hearing him reach, and feeling the grip on his sleeve, Eric spun in the direction of the pull, into a hooking left-handed punch that caught the other hard on the side of the head. It cost both his side and shoulder, but Jeff went down like a stone and he could only think, as he drew back gasping and set his teeth against the pain, _not badly done_. His aim with a blow was undoubtedly better sober than drunk.

"I didn't ask for you, either," he said to Brother Anthony who, past a startled murmur, had no more than stopped in silence, holding his mule's reins. "So when he comes to, you can get him over that mule of yours, and take him back to the castle, and I'll ask you to tell his wife for me, that I regret having to serve her man so. I'd thank her again for her kindness, but I'll make my own way from now on, and she'll likely not see me again."

"I'll do that," said the other, and Eric nodded and turned away up the path.

* * *

**Author's Note: and so at long last, it begins.**

Not because it's FINISHED...that it is not.

Despite running this sequel to _That First of Days After_ through two successful Nanowrimo exercises, and uncounted hours of banging back and forth since June 2013, looking to make all the pieces fit coherently, I _am_ still working on this beast. I've just reached a point of feeling the structure is sufficiently together that I may as well get started posting. At present that's with four chapters ready to go. My plan is to post this one for April 1st, and then the remaining three chapters on successive Friday evenings. If things go well, I may be able to go for a fifth chapter the fourth Friday out, but no guarantees: it was a problem with _TFDA_ that once I ran past my first four pre-written chapters, the whole process got a lot more difficult. I did eventually get the story where I wanted it, but have never been as happy with the results for pantsed Chapters 5 through 9, as for planned 1 through 4. This time...I really don't want to be pushing anything out before it's solid. I'm hoping that with between 30 and 40 chapters rough-outlined, and 15 to 20 with substantial amounts written, it won't be months and months between updates, but it does remain to be seen how this will go.

In the meantime, I'd like to thank all of **shorinai, Lcsaf**, and **Flint &amp; Feather** for their help in provoking my thoughts, reminding me of things that, remembered, have contributed a lot to my world-building, and...hopefully will have resulted in a more readable text.

**Postscript/PSA re _That First of Days After: _**after re-reading this through a couple of months ago, I am currently doing a re-write on it. It wasn't as embarrassing as I'd feared, but fact is, I do write better today than two years ago. So: once the re-write is done, I'll be doing a chapter-by-chapter replacement to bring the posted story up to my current standards. This _will_ result in at least a few changes, and may create a problem for anyone who may still love it in its original form. Given the difficulty of lifting anything from ffnet these days what I'm considering doing if anyone's interested, is finding some way to making it available elsewhere online, possibly as a zipped file, for anyone who might like a copy.


	2. Ch 02 - False Hopes

**Note: **a short glossary is provided at the end of this chapter, for medieval-era terms used. If you hit a word or phrase you've never heard before, it may be worth checking there for it.

* * *

**Chapter 2 - False Hopes**

_There's a difference between upholding the law, and upholding the right! An' you're dreamin' if you think none will ever now weigh one against t'other, an' ask which you preferred._

Well, the truth for Eric was that he had dreamed. What point now, after ten years' of Ravenna's poisonous rule, in saying anything to anyone past 'let bygones be bygones'? Let any who'd survived go forward and be judged as whoever they should prove to be hereafter. Too late for recrimination to mean much, Eric thought. But also too much to hope that none would prefer crying and recriminating to getting on with rebuilding their lives. It was enough to make him wish he could have refilled his flask with more than ale that morning. The thought of having to deal with the likes of Jeff and his likely friends, in this new world they'd made, was enough to make any man want stronger drink, who wasn't one of them. Strong enough to take the edges off, and blur memory past his ability to care about it. Even if it wasn't any answer.

He'd have to put it by and move on. There'd always be men of unstained morality in the world who'd feel they'd a right to lord it over all the rest, for no better reason than those rest not being them.

"If I've no better to hope for than that," he said aloud, "I'll do better alone."

_But I promise, you look to make any who lived within the Queen's law pay for doing—as though it ever served us better than hiding behind Duke Hammond's skirts with you!—and it'll be a long time before this land knows peace._

Being truthful about it, he'd grant men like Jeff and his fellows did have some right to call themselves his betters. They'd taken up arms as best they could and at least looked to go to war, once they knew their rightful king had been killed and his position usurped by a witch. Even more so the wives who took to scarring both themselves and their children to protect themselves from her. Even he might call them better than those who like him in the day, had shrugged and called it all meaningless or else nothing they had any power to resist. Or felt the price of resistance in terms of communities razed and their loved ones killed could only be too high. Or felt themselves secure enough in their positions and property to be able to outlast Ravenna. Or even only hoped to secure themselves through her ignorance of them. That had been close enough to his hope, as the embittered old soldier he had been at twenty. Returning to their cursed and blighted land a whole five years into her dark reign, it had mattered little to him who sat on the throne. He'd no reason to believe that any who'd seek royal power should be trusted with anything.

But in the end, how fair was their condemnation? All well to cry for upholding the right, but facing a wrong with both magic on her side and an army, and the ability to mow down anything in her path, there was a point past which it wasn't fair to ask that anybody take on martyrdom with you. People had to be let free to run or hide, or make whatever peace they could with it.

The forest was thinning now, as he approached the top of the ridge he'd been climbing this past hour, and shortly he broke through from the trail onto its windswept crest. From here the trackway still ran clear along the top of the ridge towards the sea to the south, and on that firmer ground the going would be easier. By mid-afternoon he should reach the spring by the track that led down its other side to the west, towards the valley and home.

He could say to that place he was always bound to return. The heart of his grandfather's dreamed-of manor, that first hide of land stretching a quarter mile wide along the coast, most of a mile back along the little river that ran through it, and up into the woodlands that lined the hills to its eastern side. It had been his great-grandfather's reward as an armsman, granted as a freehold in fee simple from the king himself, for saving the life of that king's son in battle. Snow White's grandfather, in fact. An arresting thought, for a moment, that now she should be not only his queen, but his personal liege lord.

Well, it shouldn't make it that much harder to evade her interest, should time and distraction not suffice. She surely shouldn't have time to do business with any of her yeomanry herself, and if he went on paying his taxes using his father's name, none should easily see the connection.

Time had made little difference to the hard track along the ridge line, but once he began to work his way down the hillside into what was left of the first rutted trail leading down to the valley, it was a different matter. It was steeper than the better road closer to the farmstead, which they'd kept wide and gently sloped enough for both wagons and herds to pass. One might just have led a pack horse by this route in days when it was less overgrown; now it was all he could do to see it, knowing it was there. But it was a more direct route to the farm proper and this past two years, the path he knew best.

Sooner there, sooner he'd know how much was left.

He'd expect the farmhouse still to be standing. His grandfather's work, most of it, though the hall at the heart of it, with its high archbraced roof, had been built in his great-grandfather's time. Neither of those two had ever built anything, but to last. The same likely held for the kitchen and buttery his father had added in Eric's own boyhood, and the tile-floored dairy they'd made of the room which had originally adjoined the north end of the hall. A year and a half since he or anyone he knew had passed that way, the condition of any of it might be uncertain past 'standing', but that centre should hold.

Indeed, he wouldn't be surprised if most of it mightn't be as he'd left it, though surely the worse for weather. The big hay barn had been sound the year he'd left. The two older longhouses still with thatched roofs, one remade as the settlement's tithe shed and the other as the sheepcote, would be worse for wear. Could be beginning to leak by now, under the steady beating of the winter storms in from the south, across the saltmarsh. Nowhere could pass unscathed where a crack through shutters or around a door might offer entrance to the damp, or any sort of windblown litter, or small animals. Birds and mice would no doubt have had their way amidst any stores or possessions left.

He had to take things carefully through one stretch where a tall birch tree had fallen slantwise across the path, forcing him to slide and then climb a foot or three down it, clinging to its branches. Reason enough once down, to rest a little. He shed his coat and rolled it in its bundle, gave brief thought to the problem of trimming the thing enough to pull it free, and decided against it. However tempted he might be, for now this wasn't a job to tackle with his ax. He'd do better with a saw, and his side and shoulder less sore, later. Still it was as good a place as any to break bread and finish the ale in his flask, and then sit a while on a mossy bank beside the trail, watching and listening to the greenwood around him.

It mightn't in fact be the best idea to even think of trying to start over at the farmstead by himself. Considering how far the fields must be on their way to overgrown by now, he might do better to work it as forest rather than farm. He'd never lost his love for the land, but he'd always preferred the woodlands. Hunting in the forest, within the law or not. Walking for miles through its rustling, sun-dappled shelter, learning the paths of every stream and the shapes of great rocks that might offer protection against the wind and rain that blew regularly in off the coast to the south. He'd spent a good part of his boyhood there, trekking about with his grandfather. A lot of gathering wood, and learning to hunt and track. Later learning from the old man, in the privacy of a sunlit clearing, his more lethal skills with an ax.

By the time he made his way through to the meadow that lay beyond the woods, the wind had picked up enough to be tossing the treetops lightly. Coming out into the silt-and-pebbles path of the dry stream bed that traced along its edge, he stopped to get his bearings on what was left of the high ground.

Miles now, from the blighted land around the big castle and the Dark Forest, in a landscape coming back to life with spring it was harder than he'd thought to see much of the settlement. The trees were taller now, bushes and saplings grown in along the road that led to it, and across fields once cleared. But yes, he knew the place. The outlines of a substantial farm were clear, and those of handful of smaller fenced acreages grouped by its gate. Through the trees stretches of the dry stone wall surrounding the farmstead were still visible, and the red-tiled roof of the house, and the one that had been Reg Weaver's, first on the left outside the gate. Nearer, between him and the beginning of that cluster of buildings, older wattle fences still marked the gardens and orchards and the pens for tenants' animals, hiding the overgrowth and ruin he knew must be there.

Best to get on.

Peace had betrayed his grandfather's hopes for the farm. He had counted on war, and the opportunities for well-rewarded service as an armsman, to bring him money through plunder and hostages taken. That, he held, should have allowed him to build the estate he had believed in his whole life. There was certainly land here, across the valley and north into the hills, which had lain untenanted since the days of plague and famine two hundred years earlier. If his opportunities had ever matched his ambitions, Grandfather would have owned it all. The stubborn old yeoman could have built a manor here the equal of any belted knight's. But for him the call to arms had only come a time or two, when King Magnus' father had needed to settle border squabbles with the Welsh. For Eric's father, it had not come at all. His interest had always been more in bettering what they had, over seeking to build it greater than they could decently manage.

It had been a source of contention between the two of them down all their days together, that his father's dreams had never extended further than that land they already held. He had argued rightly enough that it was enough to keep five families such as theirs in prosperity. Time enough to look for more, only after they had made the best use of what they had.

The best of what they had, including Eric.

It had been clear enough from his boyhood, that each had regarded him in his own way as the family's last hope.

His grandfather having lost to death the first son to whom he expected to leave his estate, had never faced with grace that his land must someday be inherited by his second boy. It had forced him to reclaim Eric's father as a youth from the Church to which he had dedicated him as a child—no greater source of joy for the son, than the father—and see him promptly married, making clear his hope was now for grandsons to redeem his dreams. Matters had not been aided when Eric's parents saw their first son stillborn, and the second dead of a fever before Eric, third and last, had passed his fourth year. There had been one miscarriage later that had come close to killing his mother, before his father had dug in his heels and told the old man to give over wishing for the family to increase. Then they had settled to quarreling in earnest over what Eric's fate should be as the last of their line.

His father would have divided his days between the church school in the town and what, as a boy, he had only seen as the grinding routine of the farm.

His grandfather, seeing him last fit representative of the family, had argued for training him in arms and committing him to the king's service as he had been committed in his youth. Or, he argued, if their king had no need of the boy, he might seek out one of the great mercenary companies to find him opportunities for glory. Glory, and with it the money to build their property to match all his forefathers' dreams for it.

His father had scoffed, but Eric had dreamed with the old man. Dreamed and trained in his skills. It hadn't taken three months past his grandfather's death, the summer he turned fourteen, for him to slip away with his ax slung across his shoulders, in hopes of making those dreams come true.

It had taken two years to face that his father was right. Three more to find the desperation in himself, to come home. Not to any prodigal's welcome: his mother was now dead and his father inclined to blame him for it. It had taken a year and some for them both to accept that the place was his fate, and at least here he could make himself useful.

Now as he came closer he could see the long line of the farmstead's hard-packed flint and limestone walls still stood, visible through the coppiced stands of alder and hazel beyond the tenants' cottages. Above the low, square line of the wall, the red-tiled roof of the main house rose clear as ever, and the darker outline of the barns and outbuildings, and the soft green tops of the trees in the orchard.

Here too, either side of the overgrown track which led to its gate, most of the cottages seemed still in better order than he'd expected. All still stood, sheltered by their own lower fences and garden and orchard plots. The Weavers' stone-built longhouse, sitting sidelong on its larger plot with back wall facing south against the wind, seemed as though it might have fared the best, but when he came by it he saw the door stood open, and the shutters at one window hung askew.

The gate to the farmstead also stood half open now, and at that he stopped. That would have taken someone some doing. He'd left that gate barred from the inside when they'd left, November before last, climbing free at the last over the wall with Reg's help and a ladder. His last act had been to shove the ladder back inside to fall where it might. Then he'd swung himself round and dropped loosely, sliding down fast in the frost-slick grass into the dry ditch below. Not a trick he'd have tried sober. Reg had pulled him up then to join that group of the last few tenants setting out with their goods and their animals towards the castle town. For a moment he'd felt it then as not before that, with only one or two willing to even hint they might come back in the spring, the settlement's time was done.

Now he turned instead to see how he'd come. From the height of the grass in the hollow way, with no sign of any passage through it except his own, he'd guess it a good while since anyone had been here. The stillness said equally that no one was here now. No sound of anything stirring, no sounds of man or beast, nothing past the wind and snatches of birdsong. No smoke from any hearth-fire either, that he could see or scent from any direction.

He still tugged the bundle of his coat squarely between his shoulders, and settled his ax in his hand before crossing onto the graveled ramp that led to the gate.

* * *

_Next: Eric faces 'home' as it was, and the site of his wife's murder._

* * *

**Glossary**

**Freehold in fee simple - **Very loosely, the sort of "it's yours and your heirs hereafter" ownership we think of as normal for property owners today. Most peasants in medieval times rented their lands from their manorial lords; being granted land from the king, on this basis, would be highly unusual. Its effect is to put Eric's family into the yeomanry, at the high end of the peasant class, as small landowners.

**Hide** (of land) - A measure of the amount of land needed to support a peasant family. Not a highly standardized measure of either area or value, but interpreted here as about 120 acres.

* * *

For anyone interested in a look at the sort of house I'm imagining for Eric's family, a map of the farmstead, and the story's imaginary world in general, my inspiration page for this is on Pinterest dot com. Add the string below to the basic URL that ffnet won't let me include here, and "enter", to see...

msplushbug/inspiration-board-for-the-long-road-home/


	3. Ch 03 - Truths Remembered

**Chapter 3 – Truths Remembered**

Past the farmstead gate it was warmer, where walls and buildings cut the wind that was now picking up briskly from the seashore. Here the air was almost still, where the house with its whitewashed, dark timbered walls and smoke-stained tile roof stood solid as he remembered in the afternoon sun, its height only just beginning to shade the tangle of garden in front of it. There was illusion in that seeming changelessness, though: Eric could see light reflected through the tall, unglazed windows in the hall, that spoke of shutters open within, which should be closed. There'd be some price to pay for giving that access to the weather. But still, in the narrow strip of orchard beside it the apple trees were already showing the pink and white of this year's blossoming, and at that he sighed, for that truly was unchanged.

For the rest, all was overgrown with grass and weeds, with a winter's worth of leaves blown in to mat every corner.

And yes, he'd had visitors. The well cover lay tipped aside and a bucket fallen at the foot of its wall. Both the door to the tithe shed and the gates to stable and sheepcote stood open. So did the wide doors of the hay barn, from which he now caught a whiff of mustiness and rot. Not recent, though. From the way the gate hinges squealed when he pushed it wide, that had stood where it was since before the last autumn's rains.

He walked forward slowly, looking around. Crossed to the well and braced a hand against its rim, before reaching down for the bucket. It was dry now, but lined inside with green that spoke of standing water a good while before it had dried. Best not to use without a cleaning. He set it upright and pushed straight, side and shoulder protesting. Set his hand for a moment against the crank that should raise and lower the larger barrel within the well, and groaned internally at how it resisted his effort to shift it. There'd be a lot to do here, to put things right.

Looking up to where the roof of the largest barn stood outlined against the sky, he was relieved to see nothing much wrong the state of its thatch, or that of the lower buildings beside it. A small mercy there should be no need for any attention to roofs for a while. He'd never been any hand at thatching, and the thought of risking anything that far above his head wasn't one he could stand at present. Not with side and shoulder injured; he'd have no certainty of catching himself if he slipped. The stable and the shed beside it, that had housed the farm's small smithy, were easier to face. That and part of the timbered cattle pen that was sagging.

It would be no easier to do the work needed there, though, until his injuries healed. Just less dangerous. He'd have enough to do, just to bring the kitchen garden back to a useful state. Or enough to find the tools he'd left—the more valuable of them buried under the floor in the smithy—and put them back in order to do the job.

That presumed no mess he couldn't deal with in the house, either, and at that, he did sigh. Deal with, or live with awhile?

He reached to slide his hand along the top of the wattle fence that separated house, garden, and orchard from any animals that might be wandering, then moved on towards its open gate. Depending on what he found there, it might be easier to look at taking on one of the tenant properties instead. One of the _smaller_ tenant properties. Truth was, now he was actually facing this—

_ "Dear God, Eric, you weren't joking,"_ said Sara in wonder, in memory. "This _is your farm?"_

_"Aye," _ he'd said, and offered his hand to help her down from the cart. _"What? Did you think I was telling you stories?"_

_"Not exactly,"_ she'd said, _"but when you said you'd a farm, I thought you meant like_ these_!_" She'd twisted round to point towards the gate, then back to look round much as he had, taking it all in. _"Not this!"_

She'd taken his hand then and climbed down, and he'd taken her round to see all of it.

_"You need a wife," _she had said later, and he'd smiled at that.

_"Only if you'll have me,"_ he'd said. He'd eyed her then, hopeful, until she had begun to laugh, and hugged him.

And from that summer until their third spring after, she'd been everything he could have dreamed.

Truth was, facing it now—he couldn't do this alone. As little as the prospect of setting the house in order, now that he was standing here looking up at it, made him feel cold and lost. He turned aside nearing sick, and the thought came unbidden: _I'd need a wife_. At that he froze, gripping the gate-post, stopped breathless. Then all feeling said harshly, _No!_ and with a surge of anger he swung round again abruptly, to see the whole again.

In truth that wouldn't answer. From the doors standing open that shouldn't be, to the tangle of the garden and the weed-choked lane, to the orchard where his nose was now telling him at least a season's worth of rotting apples must lie hidden in the long grass, it would take far more than any one woman at his back, to make this place thrive as it might. In any case, _no_. No. That wasn't something he could ever choose to risk again. Not here. Not even if there were ever a woman who might risk him, or imagine she might want to.

Imagination did him no kindness there, as briefly Snow White's eyes met his, her expression thoughtful, in the darkness beside a campfire. Thoughtful? Measuring now, he suspected, that dawning interest he had felt, against her own feelings. Against a girl's curiosity that neither of them should ever look to indulge.

He pushed that thought away and drew a deep breath. His young queen would hardly be the help he'd need here, in any case. It had never taken fewer than seven to keep the farm running smoothly, at least three of them men for the heavy work. Even if that was now more than he had any thought of pursuing, he'd need one or two besides himself just to restore what he could support. He sighed again and bowed head to hand to rub his forehead. Then say a pig or two, to clean up the orchard. He might in fact just stop this. _Breathe_, and consider taking matters in hand as he could. One day at a time. One thing at a time. Then remember he now had something like three years' gold in that purse he had buried in his coat pocket, and have faith that any help needed, he might surely buy.

But there was one more thing he must face, and now was as good a time as any. _Could_ he live here again, with his memories of this place?

He could see the open ground beside the well with no worse than sorrow, whether life ever returned there or not. Here, though, turning to the path between house and garden, that led into the orchard, and the emptiness of the place, it was harder. A familiar tightness born both of knowledge and fear rose in his chest and throat, and he shook his head and turned away sharply, forcing in a breath to break it.

He'd already known cause for terror here, the day it ended. He'd seen the bodies in the space by the well, and known that Sara was missing.

He'd known then what was happening, if not why.

He'd at first not known that anything was.

When Rory McNeil's daughter Beth had come tearing across the field crying for her parents, to say there were men on horses at home, he'd been knee-deep in the river where it crossed the north pasture, dragging a reluctant ewe into the water.

They'd all turned out that day to bring their flock back from winter pasture in the hills, where the shepherds had kept them the first months of spring. The day being warm, it was best chance to see the sheep washed before shearing the next week. He'd been well distracted, until suddenly Rory was splashing in beside him to catch at his shoulder, and calling for John Michaelson, and beckoning the other men with them, crying of an attack.

Beth and her brothers had been in the woods that morning, checking on the young pigs turned loose to forage, when they'd seen men on horseback coming down the road from the ridgeway. The boys had been for running back ahead of her, to see who their visitors were, but wary, she had stopped them. The group had a look of soldiers about them, she said, eight riding two by two, with one cloaked in the lead, and two archers with short bows. What should bring soldiers to them?

They'd spread out fast as they came through the hollow way, she'd said. One of each pair had dismounted, and they'd gone to each house, and led what she thought must be everyone left in the village in through the gates at the big farm. She'd seen Sara and Betsy Michaelson, and Sara's two maidservants, she thought, come out by the well to speak with them. And then she knew not what was happening, but just as young Colum had begun to protest this was stupid and they missing all the excitement, Mistress Sara had made a sign she read as forestalling the cloaked man. She'd then spoken to a boy in the group gathered round them, and he'd turned and come running through the gates. The cloaked man had reacted then with a raised hand and a shout, and one of the archers had wheeled his horse, and taken the boy in the back with an arrow. He had fallen, and not moved.

"I think it was Edwin," she had said, "Edwin Michaelson," and John had cried out, before God, all his family were there.

There had been movement then and shouting, Beth said. She thought she had seen Sara seize a staff from one of the maids and fly at the cloaked man, and then she had dragged her brothers down in the long grass and made Ian swear to keep himself and Colum hidden and still, and slipped below the crest of the hill, and run for dear life in search of them.

It had surely been the fastest half mile he had run in his life, with Rory and John Michaelson and Gareth Archer at his heels, but too late. Far too late.

By the time they reached the road, the horsemen were no more than dust hanging at the crest of the hill, and here—sickness rose in him, in memory. It had been eleven-year-old Edwin they'd found before the gates. His mother Betsy had been struck down by the well, together with her mother, Anna Smith. Only John's youngest, baby Tom, would be left him. Gareth's father Michael, the only grown man there that morning, had taken an arrow in his heart before he could as much as draw his knife.

And he, having seen signs that spoke of Sara and pursuit—the broken staff of a billhook, her torn cap fallen in the path between garden and orchard, and the bee-skep overturned by its gate as though she'd flung it down in someone's path, and run—he had run madly in through the house. In the front door and straight through the passage out the back, praying in his heart for mercy, and crying her name.

Too late. And as ever, that pressure in his chest became a band closed round his heart, and tightened at that thought, as it had when he'd first seen her crumpled in the lane, just past the back way into the orchard, and too much blood spreading into the packed earth beneath her.

God only knew what she had hoped.

_Oh, Sara._

It had been such a small, almost delicate cut that had taken her under the line of her jaw, with the curved blade of the billhook thrown down by her hand. A blade awash in blood. He might understand that now, knowing it was Finn. She probably had slashed him. Just as he had, the first time he'd fought the bastard. He'd buried his ax in the man's side, and Finn had no more than smiled. Then he'd wrenched it out and flung it back at Eric, his sister's powers having unnaturally healed him.

Reason enough to feel as he did now, that neither of them had ever had a chance.

Seeing the front door to the house had been left closed, he sighed and rubbed his eyes, feeling nothing in the moment to move him towards it. No matter of not wanting to face those rooms again in their emptiness: he'd seen them empty before. No matter either of fearing any ghosts it might harbour, drawn to his regrets. None should be there now, that he need listen to. Not even darkness. Seeing the shutters he'd seen left open, he'd find it all lit well enough. But one way or another, going in by that front door he must face the passage going out the back. Sooner or later an open door framing his memory of finding her.

Coming to face that bare, bright stretch of ground again, on any fine day like this, so much like that one—the knot tied itself again hard in his chest, heavy around his heart. Heavy enough that he folded his better arm around himself as though to keep it simply from tearing down through him, bowing his head against the pain, and his eyes welled. He could no sooner ever see walking through the orchard again at this time of year, or out the back of it, knowing she'd fled that way, pursued to her death. Especially not now, with Finn's gloating words to ring in his ears, "_She screamed your name, but you weren't _there."

As if he hadn't known. As if he hadn't heard her cry out in his dreams so often since, and heard her voice cut off in terror as he knew it must have done. His last prayer for sanity, not to hear his name in it. Not to know she had hoped. Because in the end, there was no way for it not still to _matter_, that to have cried for him she must have hoped.

He pulled his hand up to brush at his eyes, and sighed. No way for it not to matter. There'd be no redemption for ever having looked away. No matter how weary he might become of that pain.

He'd never risked their room alone since, either.

How in the name of God _had_ he borne living here that whole year after, and then some?

Well, he knew the answer to that. Only by making sure he'd never run out of whiskey.

So now he must face that he hadn't it in him to bear the memory of that passage, and coming through out that door into the lane. Fact was he'd need to find it, to live here again.

He swung round and walked deliberately across the lane, to face the foldyard pens and stable on that side of the way, and stopped, drawing a deep breath. He might stand it more easily, thinking that this was less the path to the house, than to ox-pen and sheepcote.

The damage to the stable pen was less than it seemed, and the wall of the sheepcote beside it still solid. He stopped and stooped a little there to look in the open door at the cobble-floored room. It had been his great-grandparents' first longhouse a generation before, and still smelled in a muted way of the beasts long gone. It was breaking down some now, its door sagging where damp and rot had eaten into its frame, but it could still serve its purpose if needed.

Beyond it the lane angled out of sight between the dairy and the kitchen, to where it ended by the orchard gate, and he stopped again. A sturdy fence closed off the last shady enclosure and the shed in the corner where they'd kept the pigs. Then at the last, round that corner, there would be the shelter where the ox-cart had been kept. And there before it that stretch of open ground, mostly bare grit, facing the orchard gate.

He closed his eyes, and reached to brush fingertips against the brick back wall of the kitchen, and took the last few steps unseeing into the lane. Drew a breath, and felt his throat close behind it. Different or not, how should it not still be too nearly the scene burned in his mind? The end of the lane by the orchard gate. Sara crumpled all but on her face, arms thrown up as though to break her fall, one hand awash in her own blood. The long fair braid of her hair had pulled down and fallen in it, the soft brown wool of her dress soaked from collar to shoulders. Too much blood, pooling, darkening the packed earth.

"Oh no," he had said then, with the last of his breath wrung from him and run forward, stepping over her, fallen to his knees beside her, and it still felt as though his heart should stop with the knowledge of what he saw. With a soldier's certainty he had known she was dead, but he had still reached, desperate, to pull her over onto her back and into his arms. Drawn her hair back over her shoulder to fall at her back, and cried out again in pain and denial, looking down into her face. She had been so beautiful in his eyes, and she still was, but now with that terrible, doll-like emptiness in her eyes that said she was gone. That everything that mattered was gone.

He had got her eyes closed and held her then, weeping, feeling her brow go cold against his cheek, until Reg and his Emily had found them. They'd helped him get her up then, so that he might carry her in, and Emily had run ahead to clear the table in the hall for her.

His first thought had been to lay her on their bed in the upstairs room. Then he'd remembered the blue and green quilt that covered it, and known he'd need that clean for her shroud. That, and her Sunday clothes from the chest to lay her out in, and so it must be the table in the hall for her now. which could not matter to her, for as long as it took him into that hideous night, to attend to her.

He had hardly had it in him at the time, to hear the rest his neighbours had to tell him—the little good news they had, and the worse that remained. As the McNeil children had been spared through their pig-keeping, it seemed most of the Weavers' brood had been with Ted Kelly's wife Ivy and their older daughter, down on the mudflats by the sea. They'd been digging for clams, and neither seeing nor being seen, had been spared all of it. As well, the settlement's two babes were safe. John Michaelson's youngest had been found asleep in his cradle, and little Anne Kelly playing on Anna Smith's bed, where she'd been left to be tended for the morning. But three were missing: Sara's maids, Clare and Ruth, and the Weavers' eldest, fourteen-year-old Alys.

He had gone the next morning with Reg and the others, first to try to track the raiders, and then to spread the word in town and appeal for help to trace the missing girls, to those in the castle there. Futility, all of it. They'd even managed an audience with the Queen, pleading for her help to trace the raiders, and been told: it was your choice to live where you did. Live where no manor protects you and these are the consequences.

And now? He sighed and took a step forward blind, then another.

It wasn't good enough. He could know now that it'd never be enough of anything. He wouldn't say again that she'd deserved better. However this fate had come upon them, he doubted now that any could have seen it coming any better, or had any greater wit to see through it after—but what a hollow measure of justice he'd won for her in the end. Tears slipped, and he let them go. A more godly man might say that through God's grace been granted a husband's right in avenging her death. But damn, he'd so much sooner have had her back.

He set down his ax, leaning it against his side, dragged hand and sleeve across his eyes, and found as he blinked, that the light was dimmer than he remembered. Less bright and bare, and he looked up as the breeze set leaves rustling above him, and bore the sharp, sweet scent of rowan into the air.

In three years, the tree by the end of the cart shed had grown taller, its branches fanning over the path. His mother's rowan; now with a daughter tree grown up straight and slender beside it, near to blocking the path to the orchard gate. Both had their leaves now, and sheltered here behind the house, were fully in flower, shading the path but for a few bright splashes of light. The ground was different too, drifted now with last season's fine brown and yellow leaves. Some still shone bright where the sunlight caught them, and among them lay clusters of the mother tree's fallen berries. Beyond them, against the wall, the hawthorne bushes had grown taller, too, and now added their own milder scent to the air.

From somewhere hidden in the branches, there came the call of a spring songbird, and he looked up as another answered, higher. Nature's answer in its continuity. It might change nothing in the facts, he thought, but at least he need not now remember this place as stark as it had been. Even if the feeling that woke first and hottest in him, looking on it now, was rage. Rage and no slight ache of violation, in the memory that places such as this were meant to be blessed. After what had been allowed in this place—if he believed in that, it might be better to level it all and call Nature a liar.

At the least—he swept his sleeve roughly again across his face, and reached in that fury for his ax. He could at least have both those trees down, and deny their falsehood here.

The last thing he could have expected in that moment was the sharp cry, and a sound of dull pounding that rang from within the house.

* * *

_Next: Faced with guests he might have expected, Eric needs to rethink some of his plans._

* * *

**Glossary**

**Bee-skep -** A woven basket used as a beehive. Sometimes these are still pictured on labels for honey. It's the traditional form of beehive, going back to medieval times.

**Billhook** \- A knife with a wide, curved blade, used for pruning trees. Popular gardening tools both mounted in a short handle for use as a knife, or at the end of a long pole. For anyone who's seen the _SWatH_ film, all the peasants Snow White sees in the ruined village, following on her escape, are all carrying billhooks.

**Sheepcote** \- A pen with a covered enclosure for sheep. In this era, it would be normal to have most farm animals brought inside the farmstead walls at night.


	4. Ch 04 - Visitors Unexpected

**Chapter 4 – Visitors Unexpected**

Shock froze him in place for a heart-stopped instant before instinct swept him back, ax levelled, into a turn onto guard that let him send a glance over his shoulder, back along the lane. Finding it empty, he sidestepped into the cover of the kitchen's side wall, passed the ax from right hand to left, and reached back for one of the smaller hatchets slung at his back. Paused to drag his sleeve across his eyes, clearing his sight, and waited. From here he could see anyone coming from either side, but it would take a precious moment or two before whoever came through that door would see him. Time in which to decide whether to speak or strike first.

Within the house, the pounding was followed by a screech of metal—hinges?—and a shout.

"_Hi!_ Anyone t'home?" More thumps and further screeching of metal gave place to the softer sound of footsteps, and a murmur of voices. Two?—or was that three different voices he heard?

It should be hopeful that whoever this was, was troubling to risk his attention. Unless—and again, he shot a wary look behind him—it were only distraction.

_But who? Who__—and how now?  
_

To be this close on his heels, he thought, they must have been coming down the road from the ridgeway as he was walking in the gate. Concealed by the woods where the road turned, perhaps?

He heard the bar scrape against the inside back door, and refocused. Metal screeched again as it was pulled wide, and a man stepped into view. Eric leaned aside to see further, then pulled straight in surprise and stepped back into full view, dropping his guard in deliberate irritation. "An' just what do you think you're doing here, Jeff Bowyer?!"

"Lookin' for you!" For an instant Jeff looked at him goggle-eyed—his right eye was blackening nicely, Eric noted—then raised his hands. "An' before you think to come after me with that ax, Eric, it's to make you an apology!"

"A—_what?_" Eric stared at him in disbelief. "An' what should possess you to do that?"

"Well, I could say what little conscience I have, " said Jeff.

"In other words, me," said Brother Anthony, popping out from behind him. He poked Jeff in the ribs so that he moved aside, and gave Eric a disarming smile. "He does have one of his own, which serves well enough when he doesn't let his pride get in the way of it. It just wants kicking occasionally."

"An' he's obliged, on this occasion," Jeff said, from the side of his mouth.

"What I should like to know first, though, is if you'd mind me putting Martha in that pen by your cattle shed, once I've got my baskets off her."

"Martha?" Eric stared at him, bemused.

"My mule."

"Ah, I—no." He collected himself and lowered the ax. "That'll be fine."

"Thanks." Brother Anthony gave Jeff a sharp look. "I'll get on with that, then, and you can get on with your business!" He leaned out to look round the door-frame, and gave the kitchen woodpile an appraising look. "Bring a little wood in when you're done, and I'll see about getting a fire going."

"If I make a good enough job of it, may be," said Jeff.

He met Eric's glower with clear unease as Brother Anthony padded back into the house.

"It does need to be said," he said, "that I was bein' a good bit rougher than called for with you, a few miles back. Not to put too fine a point on it, I got over a line in threatening you with consequences I'd no business doing." He folded his arms carefully, and looked down. "That's not to say they mayn't come upon you later, I've no wish to mislead you about that!—but it _is_ to say," and he shot Eric a second wary glance, "that I'll not look to bring 'em. Ye've done nothing to earn it of me, an' I should say far more to earn my thanks, for bein' there to fight when my village was raided. An' for bein' there to stand forth as ye did, when the princess came into your protection, whatever the circumstances of that. And as yon little man would say, I need to heed the fact that if you hadn't chosen differently to me and all my righteous friends following the Duke, there might've been no man there to do any of it."

He stepped down from the doorway, a step forward, and paused, blue eyes drilling into Eric's. "So the question is now, will it do?

"Better than nothing." Eric looked down, then aside again at the leaf-strewn path. "Ye'll have to forgive that at the moment, I don't know I care." He flipped the smaller hatchet in his hand, so he could offer the handle as he stepped past the other, into the open door. "Here. You'll need this for the firewood."

-o0o-

The greater shade outside had softened the light inside as well, casting the high-roofed hall into near twilight despite both sets of shutters being left open. It helped make it at least a little harder to see how time and weather had marked the room. A net of cracks now traced across the lime-ash floor where it had been most exposed to everything falling between the bars of the high, unglazed windows, and as he'd expected, there was litter everywhere.

There didn't look to be a lot displaced or missing, he thought, unslinging the bundle he'd made of his coat and setting it by the door to the main hall. But then, he hadn't left much that mattered when he left. His visitors seemed to have left all the furniture he remembered, though the three pewter serving dishes which had once lined the top of the plate cupboard were gone. From the litter of alepots and wooden dishes on the table, it looked as though four or five had eaten a meal there, probably from the kettle still hanging over the hearth in the middle of the room. All of it had been so long ago as to be no more than dry waste under dust and leaves blown in from outside.

He'd wondered if this might now be no more than a place he'd not been in a while, and in some sense that was true. The land itself, especially its woodland, still felt like home. But this? Seeing it now, the surprise was how cold he felt to it all. It might please him, he thought, to imagine it restored and thriving, with families returned to the cottages outside the gate, and say _a_ family in possession, putting it all to good use. Just not _his _now or ever, for what family should he ever have again, to need it? He could see looking back on it from the path along the hill, and being happy if that were so. But be here himself? Live here as master of it? _No_. Not after so long, and so much misery.

"It's a lot to put right," said Brother Anthony behind him, having come in to set a basket by the door. "D'you mean to take it all on yourself?"

"No, I don't think so," he said, and felt his heart lighten with saying it. "I don't mean to take on any of it."

He went to get the long pole from the corner to push the upper shutters closed, and flipped their latch into place with a still-practiced ease. "It's more than I can do without help I've no surety of ever having. Truth is that despite being born here—" He paused and met Anthony's gaze in passing, before crossing to tend the front shutters similarly. "It's always felt more burden than birthright. When I think on it, the only times I'll call happy were those my Sara shared it with me."

He stepped back, turning to put his face in shadow. "She was murdered in that back lane there three years ago, an' after this past hour I don't see ever getting past that fact."

"I'm sorry." Still full in the light, the other's expression was kind. "That's a hard thing to bear."

Eric set the pole back in its corner, and nodded.

"Even if it does look different now, it's much the same. There's enough else, that I don't see wanting to live here and see every day, either. Even here—" He gestured round at the hall. "I imagine one could fill this up with people so I'd not be reminded every day, but will it not always speak to me of her? Here, an' in the garden, and that orchard to the side?" His voice ran out and he shook his head, and drew in a breath to get it back. "I know she ran through there, Brother, an' tipped a bee-skep in the path of the man chasing her, in hopes of it savin' her—an' I promise that doesn't make me feel like ever peacefully picking apples from those trees again! An' that's not even touching that there's a room up the stairs I don't want to see, never mind ever sleep in again—alone or with any other woman beside me."

"That's a pity." Anthony considered him, waiting. "By the looks of it, this has the makings of a fine farm, and the beginnings of a village at its gate. What will you do, if you don't live here?"

"Live somewhere else." Eric crossed to the buttery door, pulled a wooden bucket from under the counter that lined its back wall, and set about packing it with an assortment of the wooden dishes stacked above. "It's a hide of land I own here. No law says I can't live anywhere I like within it. That said, I don't see as much as stayin' tonight under this roof."

He turned back to consider the little monk with as neutral an expression as he could find in himself. "As you're here, you and Jeff are welcome to stay if you wish. Make up the fire, use anything you need, just close doors and shutters when you go."

"But where are you going?" Anthony asked. He watched as Eric came to get a handful of rushlights from the basket beside the hall door, then swept up a holder for them from the table.

"Goin'?" Jeff came in through the other end of the passage, an armload of wood balanced in his good arm. "Who's goin' where?

"I'm not stayin' under this roof the night." Eric reached to take back the hatchet Jeff held out to him, and concentrated on securing it once more at his back.

"So where _are_ ye goin', then?"

Eric smiled with his best intent to be annoying. "Don't know, yet. First cottage down the lane, that suits me."

"Oo," said Jeff. He looked down at his bundle of wood. "Well, in that case, let's just have these in yon big basket, and we'll take 'em on there for you." He raised a warning finger when Eric looked at him askance. "Now, you may just take off that dubious look! I did also tell Anna I'd look out for you, and we've still some business to do, as regards that."

"And unless you really want to say 'don't follow' there's no reason we can't help you set up housekeeping wherever you like," said Brother Anthony. He gave Eric an engaging smile. "Any chance?"

His impulse might be to say 'no', but he found the sense to stop himself. "Aye. Aye—I'd reckon you're right."

-o0o-

It was agreed after a little further talk that as his was the only house left with any fittings in place, he and Jeff should go with what they carried to choose his new home. Brother Anthony would look about for goods worth taking to furnish a household for a single man, and collect them in the hall to be taken later. When that was done, he asked if, with Eric's permission, he might dig a little in the hay barn. His hope was to find straw sweet enough to fill two canvas ticking sacks from his basket, to make himself and Jeff pallets for sleeping. Having stuck his nose in the barn for a moment while putting his mule in the pen beside it, he thought the mold Eric had smelled might be in no more than the rack nearest the door. He was prepared to dig further in pursuit of a good night's sleep, and Eric was content to say he might.

It was also easily decided that he would take the second cottage at the left along the lane, that had been Ted and Ivy Kelly's. As he told Jeff while looking in on the houses around it, it was the only dwelling left in the settlement that hadn't been touched either by murder or the taking of its women, or both. They shouldn't find it haunted, he said, by any ghosts they didn't bring with them.

To this Jeff vowed he should bring none, and when he asked did Eric think he'd any, Eric could only shrug. These days he would have said not. His dreams of Sara and the others had mostly stopped a while ago, even on those nights when he'd not been able to afford the drink to silence them. But who knew, here and now? He'd slept quiet since falling in with the princess. He would have said that in their fortnight together, just as being with her had cleared the poison of too much alcohol from his body, it had quieted his mind as well. Whether it could stay quiet now, he'd see.

It helped, that he'd no strong memories of the place. It was no more than any neat, smallish stone longhouse, its doubled doors leading through a cobbled byre to a timber door opening on the living quarters. He remembered helping Ted Kelly to renew its lime-ash floor the year before the raid, and that as Ivy had always tended to take cold from the winds off the sea, her husband had been fussy about making doors and window shutters fit snug.

That had served them both well. When Eric pushed the door open now, it was on a dark, dusty, empty box of a room rather than the ruin it might have been. There were cobwebs aplenty in the corners, and mice had surely got in, from the droppings he could see scattered about, but without food to keep them, they had not stayed.

"Eh, this's cosy enough," said Jeff, coming in with his basket of wood and setting it out of the way behind the door. He waved at the stone hearth in the middle of the room.

"D'you want I should lay a fire?"

"No' yet." Once he'd propped the shutters open and unloaded the things from his buckets onto the higher steps leading to the loft, Eric set about shedding his bracers and jerkin, and began to roll up his sleeves. "I'll fetch in a bucket or two of water first, and sluice out the dust. If I'd been thinkin' I'd have brought along a broom or the like."

"Plenty of rushes by that little river downslope," said Jeff. "If that's where you're goin' for water, it'll need only cutting a few to make a new one."

-o0o-

They worked steadily together most of the rest of that afternoon, making the cottage habitable, and then carrying things down the overgrown lane from the larger house to furnish it. Eric might wonder later, how much of that was about he and Jeff each testing the other in all of strength, wit and patience. Both of them had to be careful neither to over strain their injuries nor set them bleeding again, which led to a good many moments when one or other would call a halt to some joint effort, either to catch his breath or consider how to proceed least painfully. When it came to the heaviest task of loading the hand-cart from the tithe shed with the two small chests and the pieces of one of the smaller tables from the hall, and rolling it resisting through the long grass towards its new home, the stops were many.

Brother Anthony in the meantime pressed Martha into service to bear not only the two fat straw pallets he had filled from deep in the barn, but two larger beech-leaf mattresses taken from the beds in the maids' room and downstairs, where the men who'd worked for them had slept. Those, he suggested, once squeezed in on a canvas above a layer of evergreen boughs in the cottage's single sleeping alcove, might together give Eric the unusual experience of a bed really large enough to fit him.

Once all was in fair order, Jeff had another project to suggest: if Eric was land-owner here, did his rights include fishing in that little river which bordered it? They did, Eric said, and there should at least be a salmon or two still in it. At this Jeff produced a line and a packet of hooks from his pouch, and advised that if he might impose, he should see about catching them dinner.

-o0o-

He could not have hoped to accomplish as much alone, and had said so gratefully, by the time they sat down in the dooryard about sunset, to eat the dinner his guests had done more to provide, than he. Between the fine salmon Jeff had caught from the river and baked in clay over a new fire-pit dug in the yard, and the pottage Brother Anthony had made up with barley from his pack, and vegetables foraged from the cottage garden, it was easily the best dinner he'd had that year.

With full darkness, Brother Tony collected a rushlight and called a sleepy Martha along into the byre with the enticement of a thorough brushing before bedtime, and when shortly after the night breeze began to shift offshore, Eric and Jeff set about breaking their temporary camp. Jeff, with only one hand now really good for the effort, brought in the dishes with what would be left for breakfast, and undertook to dunk their bowls in what was left of the wash-water. Eric scraped two hands' worth of live coals from the firepit outside into a sheet of birchbark, and brought them inside to light the indoors hearth.

He sighed in relief, seeing the dry wood catch and burn almost without smoke. "A good fire in here now, for a little while, and what's left of it should keep us warm until dawn."

"What's left of t'other fire's out, " Jeff said, following him with the bucket. He set it beneath the still open window, pulled the shutters tight, and slipped the bar clumsily in place. "Now I will say that's nice and snug. That last tenant of yours looks to have been a fine carpenter."

"He was," said Eric, and pushed up from his knees. "Fine enough that unless the thought bothers either of you, I'll be leaving the small window at the back open for the smoke to go out."

"Shouldn't do," said Jeff. "Eh, Anthony? We've slept often enough out of doors, haven't we, to know if seein' the moonlight would send us mad?"

"I'd think so," Brother Anthony entered, pulled the half-door to the byre closed, and smiled. "I know it's said to do, but I've never noticed any difference. Though with you, Jeffrey, it might be hard to tell."

"Ha!—it might at that!" Jeff spun his hat off to rest over the pack by his pallet, and stooped to shake his blanket from its roll. "Night air's not poisonous, either, I don't care what anybody says about that. If it were, I doubt we'd any of us be living. Least of all you, eh, Eric? You must have slept rough enough times to know better."

"More than under shelter, this past year or two." He pulled the shutter down from the tiny window under the eaves, and came back to study the fire. It would do, not to suffocate them. "I've yet to come to harm by it."

He looked around then as the flames rose to light the room, and felt that wonder again, that he should in fact be sleeping tonight under as much as a sound roof. Not quite the roof he'd expected, but then—when had he last expected anything? He'd only been walking forward into things with his eyes open and his wits no more than half about him the whole day. Pulling himself from one hope to the next, then losing each in turn and falling into something new. Coming at last to this neat little house, all furnished with things he knew his own and yet mercifully had no memory of ever seeing before, for it was all put together differently to how he'd ever seen it. Add warm and clean enough, and quiet after the never-ending ruckus at the big castle last night, and next to anything he'd taken it for granted he'd be doing this evening—curling up under a tree, wrapped in his coat? Or camping out by the hearth in the hall at the farmstead, that treacherous thought kept calling 'home' no matter how his heart shrank from the thought of it, now or ever—or anywhere else he might have found, that he could stand? This was better than he could have dreamed.

Better than he could have dreamed, and useless given what he now understood.

"Eric?" Brother Anthony said, beside him. "You've gone quiet of a sudden. Are you all right?"

"Aye." He nodded and met the smaller man's gaze. "Just thinking."

"Good," said Anthony. "Give some little thought while you're at it, to how we may help you tomorrow, in getting ready to be here alone." He pulled the chair from the end of the table and nudged Eric toward it, before circling to seat himself on the bench at its back. "We'll have no need to leave before mid-day, and I'll be surprised if there isn't a good deal we can do."

"Aye," said Jeff. He settled himself astride the second bench between hearth and table. "We might at least bring what's left of the kitchen woodpile down from the big house, and tuck it in the corner for you here."

"Aye, could do, I suppose." Eric slipped a hand up to pull at the thong catching back his hair. "I think simpler though, if you just help me close up everything that needs it around the main farmstead, and get the gate barred again." He looked up, watching them eye each other in surprise, and then swing back to stare at him. "I'm thinkin' I see nothin' for it, but that I'll need to come back with you to the village tomorrow."

* * *

_Next: Jeff points out one or two things Eric's been failing to consider..._


	5. Ch 05 - Plans and A Promise

**Chapter 5 – Plans and A Promise**

"Well, that's a turn-up," Jeff said in a wary tone, and Brother Anthony looked between them again, silent. Eric nodded and folded his arms on the table.

"Aye! I'm doing as you said. Not for quite your reasons."

"Oo," said Jeff. "Don't know that I care about reasons, as long as you're startin' to sound sensible."

Eric nodded. "I'll be there for that memorial service on Sunday. I'll give you that I should, though I'll need to be careful no one sees me, who may carry tales to Her Majesty about it.

"I reckon there'll be as many people there," he said, "as I'm likely to find in one spot any time this year, and once it's done I need to see who I may speak with."

"I see now, that if I'm to make good here, I'll need help—call it eight to a dozen good men with no better place to go. For preference men on their own, no women or children for the present, who I may offer a year of tenancy with no rents owed me, if they'll come and rebuild the place with me. Or tenancy free for a year, then fair half rates for a year or two after. I need to find out if any may be interested, and if so, how soon I may look at making a start, and with what exactly." He drew a sigh. "It's already too late for planting much in the way of summer crops—especially as I don't see being fit for the heavy work of that much before Midsummer—and anything I might do between now and All Souls' Day will depend on what I may get to do it with."

"What would you have in mind?" asked Brother Anthony.

"Well, if I'd have the help to manage it, next thing would be to lay hands on a cart such as might get a few loads of salt-marsh hay from here to town, with a team of horses or oxen to pull it. Say another team of oxen for ploughing, and help in clearing the land again. Any other beasts I might want, such as pigs to turn loose in the woods until winter. Seed for any kind of winter crop—neeps or wheat or barley—or anything else." He passed a look between them. "The way no one's harvests have been thriving here the past few years, I'll not be surprised if I end up all the way to England before I come by half of what I'll need."

Oh, not likely as far as all that," said Anthony. "I'd say talk to the brothers who oversee the farms for any of our abbeys, and I'd think you might work something out. For help with seed and smaller livestock, I'd say offer a few weeks labour in trade. For more, such as a cart or oxen, I'd suggest offering three or four months through harvest time. Or you might look to work at one of our granges, over the winter."

"I doubt any of your brothers would thank you for that!" Eric smiled and shook his head. "I'd make a worse monk than a soldier! But I'd hope it mightn't come to that." He hesitated. "Would you think there's any chance I might buy what I need, then, from one or other of the abbeys?"

"If you've money, surely," said Anthony. "Ravenna may have been no Christian, but she and her people didn't go out of their way to loot the Church of anything that wasn't gold or silver. Dealing in the humbler trades of feeding, clothing, and sheltering people, we've been able to keep a lot going."

Eric nodded. "As regards money, aye. I do have some. Her Majesty made a point of paying me the reward I'd asked for, when we first talked about me takin' her to Hammond's. I did try to get out of it when the moment came, but she got right stroppy about it, an' well—" He folded his arms again, and looked down. "I think she made a point of it because she knew I hadn't a penny to my name, otherwise."

"Well, that's all well and good," said Jeff. "But don't be missing the fact we've now a war on." Eric looked at him, and he gave the faintest of headshakes, his gaze not wavering. "Every able-bodied man worth anything will be fighting with our new Queen's army for what I should guess will be from now until summer's end...and the sort of men you're thinking of, if they're not free by summer's end, they're likely to be stayin' on with that army so we may give those worst needed at home some chance to stop home a while and see to their harvests an' readying for winter."

"An' that's your whole thought on it?" _In which do not I hear the echo, that there'll be no one worth anything, again, unless he's doing as you would?_ Eric schooled his expression to a deliberate calm. "I hope you'll not mind my askin', then, if there are any there who might have other ideas."

"Oh, ask away!" Jeff shrugged. "If it serves nothin' but to prove I'm not lyin' to you, I don't mind. But the end of it is, I doubt you'll find any to come with you now, and I am sure enough of it, to make you a better offer."

"What's that?" He lifted his head, and even Brother Anthony turned in something like surprise.

"Thinkin' as I do, that it will be early next year before you may hope to make any real start here, with anyone to help you—I think you should come home with me and Anna, and look to stay with us until then."

"_Stay_—" Eric stared at him, then pushed back in his chair. "Oh, no, I don't see that." He gave the other a sceptical look. "Even granting that we're friendlier this evening than we were this morning, I can't see how you should want that.**"**

"Can't you?" Jeff heaved a sigh, and for a moment gave his attention to settling his arm more comfortably on the table. "Well, maybe no'. But thinking things through isn't your strength, is it, Eric? No more than reckoning others' interests, or lookin' first for what will serve greater good than lies at the end of your own nose."

"Oh, Lord," said Brother Anthony, and put his hand to his eyes. "_Jeff-rey!_"

"_Which is no word against him, An-tony!_ as I think now, it's only been too long since he's had any to ask more of him!" Jeff leaned forward and rapped the table sharply. "Or not so much as ask, but just to _need, _and he see it! Until this past fortnight—am I not right?"

"If that's your idea of a soft answer that turneth away wrath, Jeff, I'll hope to never hear you go in search of a harsh one!"

"It's a'right, I've no wrath for it!" Eric said. "He's near enough not wrong." He stopped. "Near enough about this fortnight and the princess, anyway."

"You know I was drunk the day I met her," he said, when they only stared at him. "I'd come by enough coin to near blind myself, and still have a flask in each pocket, and the way I was drinkin' my courage after being hauled before the Queen and made the offer she'd then made me, you could scarce have got my attention for a woman through it.

"That, and when I first pulled her from where she'd been hiding, I promise you'd not first thing have seen her as a beauty. Just this little, pale, thin girl all covered in dirt, with her hair half tangled in her face and lookin' like something the cat dragged in. Then she looked in my eyes and I swear it stopped me." He drew a breath. "She's got the palest green eyes, an' I swear without a thing changing—I think I was lost right there, though I could not have told you to what. Call it need if you like, for she'd no one, any more than I, an' when I looked round at all that stood against her, it was wrong."

"Compassion," murmured Anthony. He turned his face aside a moment. "_Agape_."

"An' through all that," said Jeff, "the point I'd make is that I might not have wanted it this morning, but I think otherwise now. _And_ it's in that spirit of bein' my brother's keeper, that you're always on to me about, _Brother_—that and 'bear ye one another's burdens, an' so fulfill the law of Christ'—that I am now not about to complain of anything I don't hear in young Eric's plans, here, for dealin' with his burdens, without also bringing what I have to the table, that may be of some use!"

He settled, hand now braced on his knee. "For make no mistake, I am about to complain of your plans."

"Aye, should I be surprised?" Eric managed half a smile, and rubbed his forehead. "Have at it, then."

"I think you're doin' the best you know how, lookin' to get on with your life. There's nothing wrong with your ideas, and as you're not stupid it all mostly makes sense. But you know it's not good enough…

"You made a promise last night to our new Queen, when you asked that she let you go for this next year. You promised to spend that year makin' things right between yourself and any you'd ever wronged, who might fairly ever call her bein' friendly with you, or valuin' you, any betrayal of them. But now I'm hearin' _nothing_ of that, in anything you've said you plan to do."

"Aye." Eric nodded, and pushed round in his seat to stare into the fire. "Aye, well, I wouldn't quite call that a promise."

"You wouldn't?" Jeff shared a glance with Brother Anthony. "It sounded enough like one to me, with you asking that time in aid of making those things change yourself, that she was feeling moved to change otherwise."

"Aye, an' I had to stop her, somehow." He looked round, if no higher than where his hand rested at the edge of the table. "So I told her the truth! First that it wasn't her business to make anything right between me and anyone I ever wronged—that that'd be mine to do—and then, when she wouldn't let go of it, I told her that she should see change what I made change myself, and asked the year, and let her draw her own conclusions.

"I wasn't telling her I thought I could _do_ it," he said. "My asking that year, was only for _her._"

"An' then you charged her with all you'd have her do in that time, as well, an' fairly well distracted her." Jeff sighed. "So tell me this: what d'you now see happening, in a year's time?"

"No' much," he said. "A year's long enough. Time for her to do what I asked, and she'll be busy, and so will I. I'll trust that by the end of it, she understands the best thing for her is that I never go back. That she gets on with bein' Queen, and stays too busy to notice whether she sees me or not. As I'll be stayin' busy getting the farm going here next spring, and I expect the time will be past before either of us knows it."

"Damn!" said Jeff. He shook his head. "Anna's good. Because that's exactly what she said you'd do. That as soon as you left, you'd get the whole thing twisted round in your head to convince yourself that Her Majesty would have been better off never having known you, and should best never see you again."

"D'you want to call that untrue?" Eric turned to stare at him. "Now come on, Jeff, don't tell me you'd argue against it! You were there last night, and you know what I admitted to—being and doing! An' surely we both know now, the odds against it never being remembered." But it might not be best now, to remind Jeff of having taught that lesson himself. He turned once again to the fire. "Even if you aren't the one to bring consequences on me now, the danger will always be there for her and me.

"Because when I face it, how should I ever redeem myself from what I've done? How should I even know where to begin? Make anything right with anyone that ever suffered through anything I ever did as a bounty hunter? I scarcely know how many I may have harmed at my worst, and the truth is that no one owes me forgiveness."

"I promise that's not how she sees it, or will want to," Jeff said. "So as Anna reckoned, you don't plan on goin' back."

Eric shook his head, lips set. "It won't serve, that I do."

"An' this morning I might have said 'fine', to that," said Jeff, looking down, "an' been willing to say 'aye, let it all fall out as it will, in a year's time.' That's when Anna expects that if you don't appear when you're expected, we shall shortly have Her Majesty at our door in search of any word regarding you."

"An' now you'd have me there to answer that door, is that it?!"

"Oh, this morning I'd have been willing to say what hill I last saw you disappearin' over, an' let the girl be disappointed if she couldn't find you after!"

"Then why shouldn't you, now?!"

"Because I think now, it's too late for that. As it was this morning." Jeff rubbed his arm, and made a face. "Because I should say now, that whether you like it or not, Eric, you're important to the future of this land."

"No, I'm not!" He leaned forward, jaw set. "Not by any choice of mine!"

"Who said anythin' about choice?" Jeff braced himself as stubbornly.

"For the most part," he went on, "I think you were right to do as you did last night, when the princess came lookin' for you. You couldn't have stayed as she was asking you to stay. Wouldn't have been safe for either of you, and I think she could see that for her to go on holdin' you as anythin' special, for anyone to feel she put you ahead of them when she shouldn't, could be the ruin of both of you.

"A lesser man might call you a fool, for bargaining the year and a day with her, but you couldn't have made her swallow 'forever', then or there. And so you stand nearer the Queen's heart now, than any other man in the kingdom."

"She's no' in love with me!"

"Oh, you may argue that 'til you're blue—and today, I might even agree with you—but I should say she's near enough, as makes little difference."

"Jeff, she's a child, and the words don't mean the same thing!"

"But that's the problem, isn't it?" Jeff said. "She's nineteen in September, and this next year, as she comes into that womanhood she's been so long denied, if you think she won't remember you kindly, you're dreaming. Not if she can already think in such terms as to call you fetching in your underwear!"

"Oh, Christ!" said Eric, and put his hand to his eyes. "Shut up! I'm already regretting I gave her that idea by calling her fetching in plate steel, but there's nothin' I can do to take it back!" He shook his head, with more than a touch of desperation. "I don't care how she remembers me, as long as she shows the sense to understand I can't be hers!"

Jeff's chin came up, and then he grinned. "An' you think you trust her to see that sense, after she waits a year to see you again? Then you just try this thought for size. You _go_ back to see her in a year's time. Now tell me the look on her face, when you walk in the gate with a new wife holdin' your hand." He smiled when Eric stared at him. "Aye. I'd call that a flinch. You know your danger. You're not free, until she says so."

"That's no' going to happen," Eric said.

"Ahhr." Jeff heaved a sigh. "Well that's why I'm sayin', you need to come home with Anna and I, first. We got to start somewhere."

"What're you talkin' about?"

"Your biggest problem right now, lad, is that nobody knows you. You hardly know how to be among plain, decent folk any more, in which to show yourself not that different. You need to get that back.

"Now, I won't say there's nothing self-serving in asking you to come spend the summer with us," Jeff said, with a glint in his eye. He pulled his good hand to his arm yet again.

"It'll be a while before I mend, either. Between us we'd just about make one man fit at the moment, and it'll do you no harm to have a share in helpin' rebuild our village, in return for my girl's fixing you up. But that's beside the point, you need greater safety, too, than you can have here alone. You need a place to get well. Finish the good you did saving our village, by taking a part in rebuilding it.

"Let that become what you're known for among us, as we trade up and down our valley. We're less than a day's walk upriver from the road between Hammond's and the abbey on the delta, at Llyswennod Cross." He shrugged. "You could stop in with us at the abbey next Tuesday, and see what business you may do there. Then take your time, over the summer, talkin' with people about this place, an' your family, and what you hope to do here."

He grinned. "Eh, by the time it's time to send you back to face Her Majesty, you'll be respectable enough that no one will mind your past. You'll be safe enough for at least a quiet visit."

"An' if she wants more of me, we'll could be right back where we started."

"An' then you can sort it as man and woman, and you her subject and she your Queen, and both be less confused about it." Jeff sighed and looked aside at Brother Anthony. "Would that seem fair to say, to you, Anthony?"

"Fairer and safer than looking to disappear," said Anthony. "I'd grant you might mind your own business unnoticed a long time here, Eric, if nobody were to come looking…but you know you'd be found eventually. And you wouldn't be free in the meantime, if you were always having to look about avoiding notice."

"Aye, I suppose." Eric nodded, and heaved himself up. "As I must do tomorrow." He crossed to the hearth, where the fire had now collapsed to coals, and took up the iron to push them together in their nest of ash. "Well, if none'll come back with me here, I may go back with you for a time…but I'll try my own plan for this first."

-o0o-

It was surprising, at the end of it, that he should now feel unequal to sleeping in a bed. Enough to have had an afternoon without his heavy knife-belt and the hand-axes slung across his back. By feel, he hung up his kerchief and jerkin on the pegs beside the sleeping alcove with its big box bed. Glanced back towards the hearth, where Jeff and Anthony had now settled on their straw pallaises, rolling in their blankets next to the covered fire. The moment come, he wasn't even comfortable with the thought of taking off his boots. Easier to settle for getting himself down, and pulling his long coat around him for a cover, with his purse still stashed deep in its pocket. He'd prefer to keep that close.

He swung his coat down from its peg and across the bed, then gripped the high side of the alcove, and bent to brace himself against the low, sturdy frame of the bed. It was enough to let him ease carefully around and down onto the rough blanket, sighing as the mattress gave way, rustling as only beech leaves could. He shifted, considering lying back, and stopped, dreading it: no doubt that was going to hurt. It would be hard to sit up, too, once he was down. Easier instead to sit a moment and roll down his sleeves, reflecting that he'd do as well to sleep in his clothes. Yesterday's new shirt was still clean enough to be the best protection for the bandages wrapping his side and chest.

Time enough for the rest of his life, tomorrow.

And time enough, in a year, to grant he'd have to go back and give his Queen a chance to see him if she wants.

* * *

_And now, as quickly as possible, we will be getting back to find out what Snow is doing…_

* * *

**Glossary**

**Midsummer Day – **June 21st.

**All Souls' Day** – November 2nd, the day after All Saints' Day, November 1st, for which the vigil night is Halloween / Samhain.

As this is an era with no personal clocks or watches, most people keeping time either by the sun or church bells, I will be making more references to special dates on the calendar as I go along. In this fantasy AU, people use both the Christian calendar, which is liberally supplied with saints' days, and references to the major pagan festivals of sun and moon.

**Neeps** : Turnips. A popular winter crop both for animal fodder, and humans.

**Stroppy: **Noisily argumentative and belligerent.

* * *

**And an author's note about feedback…**

Feedback is always welcome, but I'm going to say would be especially so for this chapter. It's one of those situations where I've done my best, but it has taken _for-freaking-**EVER**_ to pull the last scene together, with Jeff prodding Eric towards the thought that he could do a lot worse than spend the next month or two with Jeff and Anna, back at the river village…and well beyond normal uncertainties, I'm having trouble looking at it right now, without feeling as though I've been belted in the back of the head. Either that or that I _need_ to be, to rearrange the rocks! I honestly don't know whether to hope that readers will not be feeling similarly…or that anyone _will_ be, who's up for laying down where they have problems with it, and God willing, giving me any clue whatever, what to fix.

Open for suggestions…


	6. Ch 06 - The Dance Begins

**Chapter 6 - The Dance Begins**

The wonder was, William thought, that given all the ways in which the day had been so extraordinary, it had all turned out so well.

Once the musicians in the room had decided what their tunes should be, the party had taken on more the air of a country wedding than festivities to mark a coronation. Except for the greater mingling of those of high and low estate in the groups still gathered around the tables placed for each of the manor lords, it might have been an Easter feast as they had kept them at Hammond's in his grandfather's time.

Certainly the dinner had been less a royal feast than a decent tavern supper—but from where he stood, there were few in this room ever likely to look more than distantly askance at any of it. He would wager none in the crowd summoned in from the courtyard. Most of them were simply as grateful for what was likely the best meal they'd had in weeks, as bewildered at their new queen's having called them to share it with her.

Better to mark the end of ten years' misery with a celebration not too fine for all to share, than wait to do anything more royally fitting.

He had worried a little that afternoon, looking back from his place amid the nobles who had gone to line the forecourt stairs once the coronation was done. Waiting for Snow White to follow her guard of honour down those stairs to its lower landing, to speak to the crowd waiting for her, he had seen her stop with her women at the end of the gallery between great chapel and hall, and turn aside. She had bowed her head a moment, hand brushing past her eyes, and said something, as she drew the gold-shot shawl around herself, that Greta had come to put round her shoulders. He had not caught the words, but there had been grief in it. She'd not met anyone's eyes, either, when she looked up, hand gone to her shoulder to hold the wrap in place, for Lady Marjorie to pin. Then she had caught up her skirt and come silently down the stairs after the knights of her guard, to address the crowd gathered below.

They had agreed to what she must say, the day previous. Or rather they'd accepted what she had told them she would say, when she and his father had met with the Archbishop and such manor lords as had gathered in the Duke's quarters by mid-afternoon. Its purpose had been to report on the state of those matters with which each had been charged, and consider what was needed next. It was a meeting that she had soon risen to ask that they remove to her father's cabinet adjoining the library, where his great map of the kingdom still hung, that she might better understand the state of it.

"Even I know this can only be a beginning," she had said, and strode away, leaving them to leap up, pell-mell, and follow.

"I need to know, " she had said, staring up at the map in the council-room, "this hour, my lords, how much of this land is truly ours? How many of those fortresses and manors I see here—" and she had swung round, frowning. "My Lord Duke, if they still stand, who holds them?"

"Most do still stand," His father had glanced at the Archbishop, and Count Cerdic. "Except for those strongholds within what is now the Dark Forest, all. But you are right, most above the state of an ordinary manor are in the hands of Ravenna's governors."

"We have kept that record," said the Archbishop. He looked to the prelate and two monks who had accompanied him. "Our brothers have been freer to travel than most."

"I'd have this map down," she said, "or a copy made, and have you mark upon it what we know. Surely someone here must have charcoal or ink?"

"Master Ambrose," said one of the monks. "Shall I fetch him, your Grace?"

"Yes." Archbishop Ranald nodded approval. "There is an artist, Your Highness, who came to us last year, to study the wall paintings in the chapter house at Llyswennod. I believe he might make a map suitable for your purposes."

"A large one," she had said. "A sheet, perhaps, sewn over a frame." She had paused. "I don't know how well I read, any more. I am likely to do better with pictures for some time."

"In the meantime," said his father, "the land we may say we hold is that south of the road down the mountain from my ducal seat. Once we reach the valley between that road and the Dark Forest, extend it north to the forest lands, but little further. Then down again to the coast. Every manor my couriers reached has sent its levy of knights and armsmen."

"Still not that much," she had said, and none had contradicted her. "How, then, do we proceed? If any of those fortresses get their gates closed against us, what then?"

"Then they'll be trapped, my lady," said Sir Mark, "and we'll be waiting for them when they come out."

"Waiting with what?" She had studied the tall young knight intently. "Beyond that small force that rode today, what? An army of farmers and milkmaids? I grant they're willing, but my lords, how fit are they for it? Moreover," turning to take them in, and ending once more with the Duke, "How many? How long? It's May," she said. "By Midsummer, any man we take from the land now must be back for the haymaking!"

"Not so fast," William had said then and risen. "It's a matter of how we use them. No, they're not armoured knights, but most men still train in archery from childhood, and they're strong from the work they do."

He looked at his father. "In a straight fight, my lord, there is little hope of our taking any of the most powerful fortresses without a long siege, and even with siege engines such as the trebuchet we burned this morning, I would not be confident of breaking the walls of Dinas Uaine, or any of the Four Sisters. Certainly not without word of our assault spreading, and forces from other sites falling upon us. I think we must look to other means."

"What means?" the Duke had asked.

"Stealth."

He had felt Mark and one or two of the other younger knights recoil at that, and that part might have gone ill, if any had moved to speak before Count Cerdic had leaned forward on the table's edge and said, "You, with your archers."

"Yes." He had paused. "There is still ordinary traffic in and out of all these fortresses, my lord, and as long as no word of our victory today reaches them, they have no reason to lock their gates. If we can bring men and weapons to each of them, by stealth, sufficient to open the gates—or to surprise their garrisons and take them by storm from within—" He had risked a smile, seeing only consideration in the square-jawed old man's face. "We might perhaps even enter disguised as Ravenna's troops, accompanying supply trains. Accompanying them in greater force than usual, since the problems of raiders striking at them may be said to have worsened..."

Flower of the land's knights for a generation, exemplar of knighthood's highest principles, and the man he and half the younger knights in the room had served as a squire, it would need only Cerdic of Pembrokeshire's word against a strategy, to condemn it.

"Some might call it dishonourable for a knight to pursue such means," he had said. Then he had leaned back in his chair and his voice chilled, "Plan it." He had considered William straight, his expression as set as something carved in stone. "How quickly might we mount two such attacks?"

"Where?" asked the Duke.

"Carmarthen and Carreg Mawr." Cerdic replied. "Secure our borAs soon as we may."

"Within a fortnight," William said. "A sennight, if it can be done."

The first thing, they had still agreed, was that they must first call upon every person to be silent.

"Then that shall be the first thing that I ask," Snow White had told them. "When I speak to everyone, after I'm crowned." She had looked around, questioning. "Can all be called together, after? In the great hall, perhaps? I don't see us holding a feast as such, but at least have everyone sit down to break bread, and—if the people from each manor can be gathered with their lords, and I speak to all, and then to each group, to make plain our danger is not past—perhaps even show them the map?"

"You would appeal to the common folk as well?"

"As I have done." She had stared them down then, for a long, silent moment. "With their help, I have done that which only I could. Now I need their help again, that we may all finish it."

And so today she had said: "We have won the day, and I am crowned, " and as they had begun to cheer, held out her hands to quiet them.

"I am crowned, but it's only a beginning, and the first thing I will ask of you is silence." Let no bells ring!—not yet!

"It must seem, for a time, as though nothing has changed here, and I know as well as anyone that in the past ten years, no bells rang here for any reason, past the village church sometimes. In that silence, we may shape our future, and I call on you now, to do it with me!"

"What I would have you understand, is that today has only made a beginning. Castle Magnus may be the greatest fortress in this land, but it is only one of many. Most are still held by governors and garrisons put in place by Ravenna, and everyone within their reach is hostage to their power. We cannot call this land reclaimed for its people until the last of Ravenna's governors have fallen, and the gates of every castle stand open to all of us."

They had waited in silence then, as she had explained what she wanted. She had asked them to gather according to the manors from which they came, including those from the village, her own manor. Then she had beckoned, and people looked at each other, and beyond wonder, they had done as she had asked. Filed into the hall in good order, and found their way to the various lords and gentry they knew, as though bespelled. Even the children had been quiet, the youngest clinging to their mothers' skirts, and the older silenced to whispers, in their uncertainty.

The confirmation of their names was also more quickly accomplished than they might have hoped, and then the marking of their manors and villages on the large map Master Ambrose copied from the one in her father's cabinet chamber. That itself was a wonder, worked up in red chalk and charcoal and careful washes of colour across two sturdy linen sheets tacked to a frame. Half the manor lords in the hall would never have seen such a thing...but she had spoken about it as a portrait of the land and they had understood what mattered.

_The need now, is to spread the word quietly through every manor and vill where they may trust that no one ever benefitted from the governance of Ravenna. That word that it is time to arm, and wait, then, for the men who will ride out to call them to reclaim the land. Men who may, on the face of it, appear to be Ravenna's troops—except that when they stand before your manor gates, they will raise the true king's standard of the uprooted tree._

And then she had said, "I, too, will come as soon as I may, to learn of you, and of what you need, that we may begin to redress the years of injustice."

He looked up, and shifted a step to make room against the column at his back, as Count Cerdic stepped in beside him.

"So, young prince, has your heart slowed down yet?" he murmured past the rim of his ale-cup. "I had not seen you so disconcerted in a long time, as by that conversation you were having with our Queen, before she called me to this latest duty." He nodded towards the circle of dancers, where Snow, rosy and laughing, was now following Sir Mark in a country dance. "I am curious to know how she did not name you to it, as I would have expected."

"I should call it being wiser than she knows," William said. He grinned at Cerdic's look of deliberate and stony surprise. "She startled me, sir, by telling those people of the Vale who have come south to us at Hammond's, that she would soon come among them to learn of their state—at which I expect you saw me stop, appalled. I could only think that if she would undertake such an adventure before the ground be won, we could have none to spare for it."

"And you think I should be better spared than you, Sir William?" Cerdic lifted his eyebrows, and William smiled a touch more tightly.

"In the moment, sir, I could think only that as I and my men must ride for the Welsh border at dawn, and look to plot our ways through the gates at both Carmarthen and Carreg Mawr by the week's end, neither I nor they could support such a project within a month."

When he had drawn breath to protest, she had given him for an instant almost a look of apology—and then, her lips set and chin lifting, the faintest of headshakes. _This_, her expression had said, _is not yours to question_. At his anguished stare, she had drawn him aside and said, "This is no part of my charge to you, William!"

"You have more urgent things to do," she went on, and he made bold to interrupt.

"Do _not_ tell me you mean to do this alone," he had said, "or without knights to accompany you. Above all not if you plan to go before your rule is secure over the manors you visit! You may meet with more than you bargain for, or may confront with any safety without at least a small warband."

"I do not think to do so!" She had not let him go then, but for a breath her gaze had retreated, and he had pressed on.

"You should not be going _anywhere_ before we have at least reason to believe it is safe for you, and have confirmed it by the day!"

"I will begin here," she said, "as I am in fact lord of this manor and the town which stands outside this castle's gates, and I will seek to know my vassals' needs first." She had looked at him then, and frowned. "Those who are left have surely suffered more here, at the heart of that blight Ravenna cast, than anywhere else! But it cannot be long before I ride out myself, to see how the rest of my subjects fare. The Queen's charge is all the land. I must know its need."

She had looked round then, her hand still tight on his wrist, and beckoned Count Cerdic. "Milord Count of Pembrokeshire, a word!"

"You have committed to serve as my castellan until the new year," she had said, "and now I would ask: may I call upon you as Queen's Champion, as well? I will have need of a proven knight to stand with me as I go about my business among these manor lords, and I can think of none more capable or widely known."

"It would be my honour, Your Majesty," Cerdic had replied, "if you wish it." He had stopped, then, and his glance flicked to William, and then back to Snow White. "You know it would be more usual, to choose a knight of your own generation for such a part in your service?"

She had smiled then, and let go William's arm.

"My need, my lord Count, is for more than that strong right arm I know is still yours. It will help me more in rebuilding this land, to have the aid of a man who remembers it as it was, and should be."

"She means to be careful," William said now, "not to be misled as an innocent. She looks to be informed by your experience, Count Cerdic, and your knowledge of the manors you visit." He glanced aside. "Those manors, and those who've governed them, from times when you've seen them before."

Cerdic considered this. "Aye, I suppose. No more than her father must in time have done with her. I would only prefer it be left until we have the country won back securely to her rule."

"I think best not to wait so long," William said. He let his gaze return to the dancers, to where Snow, now at the far side of the circle, stepped out to turn lightly under the hand Mark held above her. Lightly, steadily, her full skirts swirling, her expression alert but in the moment _remote_—_What did you do, all those years shut up?_ he had asked, and she had shrugged. _Sometimes I danced_.

"Not even if she would have it, my lord," he continued, "as I am sure she will not! I think she will be safer if she is trained to support herself in the field. To ride and camp rough, to defend herself from horseback, and to lead—or at least to conduct herself with a knight's understanding. She needs not to be readily taken or held, if anything separates her from those who would protect her."

"Do not say you would have me make a knight of her!"

"In skills, no." William shook his head. "I don't see there'll ever be time for that, or her having the interest. She's still a woman, and for all she will rise to the need if it arises, I should say there's nothing in schooling in arms that draws her."

"All matters in which she might be as well trained by yourself," said Count Cerdic, "or young Mark of Midwald, there, or Sir Hugh, or even young Sir Gareth."

"And you may call on any of us, my lord, if you wish, but I think it must be your authority that guides her." He smiled. "Even I—having been her playfellow as a page, my lord, I may have some power to say things to her that she'll heed from no other, but we were never formal together. She still has power to deny me in a way I cannot think she will manage with you." He let his smile light, with something nearing mischief. "How many brash and ignorant young squires have you seen knighted, my lord? I cannot think you will not fare as well, in tutoring her as our lady."

Cerdic snorted. "Puppy!" But he smiled, and William risked more.

"I don't trust she wholly understands, but for now, I think she needs a champion able to stand as nearly father to her, as any living man may." He pulled away from the pillar as the music stopped, and met the elder knight's gaze square, with irony. "And I would not recommend my own father for the task, sir. Past the fact that she needs his skills for other things, I think she has him terrified already."

* * *

_This chapter having begun as one, and ended as two...next up, William and Snow, with quite a few others in passing.  
_

* * *

**Glossary**

**Fortnight** \- Old term for a two-week period (fourteen nights).

**Sennight **\- Old term for a week (seven nights).

**Vill **\- An early term for a small village associated with a castle or manor.

* * *

_**A/N** _

Hoping to get next up by this coming Saturday or Sunday.

With this chapter, readers from the UK will begin to spot the occasional "real" place or territorial name. While I'm probably conceiving them approximately where they are, don't count on them being in the countries they actually are. For anyone not checking out the map posted on my Pinterest board, I've located Tabor on a fictitious land bridge between Britain and Ireland, and borders with all of Wales, northern England, Scotland, and Ireland _have_ all been messed with.


	7. Ch 07 - Royal Children

**Chapter 7 - Royal Children**

"Enough! Enough, I think!" With the next break in the music, Snow White stepped out from the circle of dancers and pulled up her hand to release her fingers from Sir Mark of Midwald's grip. She bobbed a curtsey, smiled at his fleeting look of startlement, and offered her hand again with a sweep that pointed him firmly towards the fireplace corner where her chair had been set. _Yes, pretty knight, you may show me to my seat_—_and do not look so surprised, that I am not yet too dizzy to know where it is! _

She could not claim to feel even a princess yet, despite the fact of her now being Queen. No sense of that royalty which had drained from her through the long years locked away, had so far been able to make itself felt through the urgency driving her these past few days, from the freezing darkness of the courtyard at Hammond's. _I will become your weapon. _But there was an echo of familiarity in being handed gracefully through a cheerful crowd of dancers scattering from a cleared circle in the centre of a hall. They were only taller now, and her court dress tighter and heavier, and so too the crown that bound her brow. Destiny or accomplishment, she might ask later. For now, if she had inherited a darker hall and a less glittering court than for the fêtes of her childhood, with only a few bright dresses and cloaks to brighten the company, tonight she could not care. It was warm here, and she saw no one unhappy, or not at least at peace and well-wishing.

Now, though, it felt time for the whirlwind to set her down. She drew her hand free again—"Thank you, Sir Mark, I am ready to sit a while—" and swung round to accept his sweeping bow in retreat. She shook out her skirts before settling again into the large gilt cross chair set for her on the dais, and looked up as Catherine appeared at her side to offer a cup of wine. "No, thank you!" She gave the girl a minute headshake. "Any more of that, and my head will spin tomorrow."

She sat studying the hall as pipes and bodhràn and flute struck up the next reel, and the circle re-formed into a doubled line of couples. This time the pattern was one she didn't recognize, and she shook her head at a murmured question from Lady Helen of Llandrin Wells. Now manageress of the Queen's personal household, as her husband Sir Peter would be her minister for treasury matters, Helen was one of the few women Snow White could remember meeting as a child. Then a tall, slender, older girl who had impressed her as clever and pleasant, she had proved to have changed little despite now being a woman with a child of her own.

"These were just becoming fashionable the year my mother died," she said, "and I never learned this one. Too quick! I couldn't hope to follow at this hour." She met Helen's bright brown eyes, so nearly matching her gold-trimmed brown dress. "Even with Sir Mark's _masterful_ guidance, which oddly I do remember from when we both were babes."

She cast a glance at Duke Hammond, seated aside and a step lower beside her, and the Archbishop beside him, risen at the moment to speak with one of his companions nearer the fire. "I think I am near to having enough of this evening, my lord Duke, but if I am hostess, how seemly is it that I be the first to leave my guests?"

The Duke smiled, and in it she saw a touch of his own fatigue. "As queen, my lady, you need only leave your servants to attend them. There are enough of us for that."

"I think I will, then." She drew a sigh that turned into a yawn and hid it quickly behind her hand. "Is there anything more I need do, then, before calling the night over? I think I have remembered all who should be thanked for their aid today, and done as much as needs to be done for anyone to whom I owe duty—"

"I can imagine nothing more," he said. He turned to beckon William from the table behind them. "Give us a few moments to collect your guard of honour, Your Majesty, and when this dance is done, we shall have the trumpets blown to announce your retiring."

"The same to gather your women and send them ahead to your chambers," said Lady Helen. "Marjorie and Greta should follow with you, Your Majesty, and we need someone to take Catherine and Lisl before. It has been an orderly enough evening, but I shouldn't want them going unescorted through the crowd in the second courtyard, at the moment."

"We can have Lisl's lad Matt go with us, my lady," said Catherine, and nodded towards the dancers. "They're out dancing at the moment, but it won't be for long."

"Well enough," said Snow White. She settled back and stifled a second yawn. "Oh, dear! I'll hope not to fall asleep, before time."

-o0o-

Once the doors to the hall thundered shut behind them, and the sounds of cheering dimmed, she counted eight steps into the torchlit gallery and stopped dead in her tracks. At her shoulder William all but walked into her; he caught her elbow and huffed in surprise. Behind them on her left, Sir Gareth of the Vale pulled up short with a gasp, treading on Marjorie's skirts. Ahead of them, both tall Mark and his shorter cousin, Sir Michael of Midwald, got two strides further on before they realized no one was following them. Only Greta, following at her right, and James of Anglesey, following after her, quite managed to stop where they needed.

"Snow," William said under his breath, and let her go. "What are you doing?"

She sighed. "Just beginning as I mean to go on."

Turning slow, in the space opened around her, she took in their faces.

"I accept," she said, "that I must live with being guarded. I accept that on public occasions where I am in my state as Queen before all the world, an honour guard of four and one or two of my women may be as little as I can afford." A flicker of movement behind them, in the darkest corner near the hall doors. "Not counting the rest of the troops, or any of my less..._regular_ defenders." She focused on the shadow and smiled. "That is you, isn't it, Col? So I imagine that's Duir by the arch through the passage through to the second courtyard."

"Aye," said the smallest of the dwarves, and stepped out where they could see him, pickax hanging easy in his grip. "Quert's about here someplace, too."

"An' ye don' be giving your position away like that!" scolded Duir, from the passage. "No' even to her, if you're in cover!"

"Sorry," muttered Col, but made no move to fade back again into the shadows.

"I'm not worrying about them," Snow White continued, "because they're not going to be in danger of my falling over them at every turn!" She let her gaze circle their faces again. "Before the world, I accept! But once we step from that general regard, matters must be simpler.

"Within my own home, among my own people," she said, "It's my wish to stand on ceremony as little as possible. So I'll grant two men to guard me at such distance as I may ask, within a few arms' length, and ladies, we shall learn how many or few of you it may be sensible to have attending me. I'd as soon not waste your time with keeping me company, when there's no need. Beyond that, I need to be able to go as I will." She stared at each, deliberate, in turn, ending with William. "I will not be made a prisoner again, only in a larger cage."

"No one should be looking to do that to you," he said, but he glanced at Mark and Michael and hesitated. "Look," he went on,"can you tell me what it is you want, right now? Because you can make any speech you like, Your Majesty, but I promise, tonight there's no way you're going anywhere with fewer than four of us."

She lifted her chin, and he sighed, and drew in a breath and glanced around. "Not when it's after dark, and we've too many people loose within these walls tonight of whom we can't be certain, against too few we can. Not at the end of a long day, when no few of both groups have been drinking." He faced her and shook his head. "Not happening. Not you—even if I doubt there's any here would wish to harm you—and not these ladies either."

"What I'd like—" She let her gaze fall for a breath, then sighed and met his eyes. "A walk along the castle walls, to clear my head." She glanced at Marjorie and Greta. "Not knowing how long it will take, I'd have you two go along to my chambers with your own guard, and perhaps—" beckoning, "Col, Duir, would you go with them? I think none will disturb them if you go before, looking fierce with your pickaxes."

"Sir James, would you escort them?" asked William. "I can make the fourth here, in your place."

"I will do," said Sir James. "I may take up another armsman or two, passing through second court." He smiled at Greta's nervous expression. "None should wish to harm you either, ladies, but Lady Greta's pearls alone could tempt thieves."

"And if you wish, Your Majesty" said Sir Michael, "Sir Mark and I can go a little further ahead to make the way clear for you. We shall still see you guarded, but we may be less formal about it."

-o0o-

"If I'd been thinking," she said, as they climbed towards the level of the throne hall, "I would have asked the sergeant overseeing the stairs to be sure the throne room doors are closed when we pass." She looked up, following the light of Mark's torch, and those of the sergeant and his armsman above them. "I must see Ravenna to her pyre in the morning. I'd as soon feel no duty to visit before then."

"You needn't," said William, at her heels. "The doors have been chained shut, and she's not there now, in any case."

"What?" Snow White stopped and stared at him. "What do you mean? Where is she?"

"We took the stretcher from there last night, to one of the undercrofts," he said. "There was an alarm, and we judged it best to keep the body where we could seal against intruders."

"What alarm?—what intruders?"

"Ravens," he said, "Just past first light, four or five big ravens flew in through the dome of the oratory roof. They seemed confused at first, flew into the throne hall and ah—around a bit, and then a pair of them tried to strip the covering from the body. We'd shrouded her in one of those grubby red banners from the hall. I gather they managed to pluck it back from her face before the guards drove them off, and then they all fled, and the guards sent to report to my father."

"Who said nothing of any of this, to me," said Snow White. "I hope that isn't him beginning as he means to go on, as well..."

"He wasn't about to wake you for it." William sighed, his expression more tired than troubled, she judged, and waved her on, upwards. "Not on your coronation day—and there surely wasn't time, later."

"So where is she now?"

"In an undercroft below the garrison barracks. In a room a mouse couldn't make its way in or out of, with at least three men on guard against trouble," he said. At her eyeing him, he sighed again. "Such state as she shall deserve, until her pyre on the beach in the morning."

"Yes." She pulled her shawl around her, gathered up her skirts, and began to climb again. "I'll be there for that. That much I feel I owe her." _And__ myself, that I face my handiwork_.

"In the meantime," he said, "the throne hall doors are staying locked until we get some sort of grating over the vent in the oratory roof."

"Another thought," he added, as they came out at the head of the wide stone steps. "When you come before that pyre tomorrow, don't be surprised if there doesn't seem much to burn. The guards who saw Ravenna last night, after the birds pulled back the banner from her face, said the body seemed to be drying out...a husk falling in on itself, into something much smaller."

"Like Finn," she said. "Giving up her stolen life, perhaps." Hand resting on the balustrade, she stopped. "If she were truly old beyond our imagining—if all the years she stole to keep her young were only bound to her by magic—might they not be released when she died? Might that life force be freed to flow back to any she'd taken from, who still lived?"

"I suppose it's possible," he said. "Those three old women you found hiding in her chambers—"

"Now three quite young women again. Also thinking of Greta, who only saw her hair come back to its colour in the last hour she was locked up—after Ravenna was dead—and the rest of the women from her village recovering, too."

"It makes as much sense as anything." He held out his hand toward the doors into the last gallery before the throne hall, where Mark stood waiting with his torch. "No need to stop here, now, at any rate."

"No." She followed, letting him circle again behind her, and nodded to Gareth, taking up the rear again at her left. "None..."

But another thought occurred, and she paused again in the passage outside the throne hall. "Wait. William, what's been done with the mirror?"

"Mirror?" He stared at her, his expression going blank. "You mean the one in the oratory, on the altar? I think Father wants the Archbishop to see it in place. Why?"

"I don't know," she said, and glanced back at the throne room doors. "The Archbishop is one thing. I'd like him to see it, too—the dwarves as well, I think—but I'd as soon no one else. I'd like it out of there before anyone goes in to work. A locked room in the library, perhaps, and covered, until we know more of what it is."

"I might regret asking," he said, "but are you wanting to see it now?"

"No!" She shook her head, and turned again to where the postern passage now stood open. "I'm not even sure why I should think of it now." A knot seemed to bind feather-light, in the centre of her forehead, and she pressed a fingertip hard to the spot, rubbing it. "I'd prefer no one be let near it, unless there's a chance they may be able to tell us anything about it." The stricture faded, and she let her hand drop. "I'd prefer no one be let to be alone with it, either."

"D'you think it's evil then, Your Majesty?" the sergeant asked.

"And are you all right?" asked William, stepping closer.

"N-no," she said, then blinked. "No—yes!" She rubbed her forehead again in irritation. "That's to say, William, I'm fine! And as regards the mirror, sir, I don't know, but anything my stepmother prized so highly as to give it the place of reverence she did, I suspect we will be safer to treat as more than it seems." But not, perhaps, urgently. "One more thing to be dealt with in the morning."

-o0o-

When Snow White emerged from the gateway into the flagstone square before it, where the walls stood closest, Michael and Mark were waiting again, and she gave them a rueful half-smile.

"I hadn't thought of this before," she said, "but I know these walls stand emptier tonight than they may ever do again, because tonight we have not the men fit to hold them. May we not continue being informal?"

"We may," said Michael, "as soon as we all know which of us stays close enough, to bear one torch to light your way."

"Me," said William. "Unless you object, Snow." He waited until she shook her head, and returned her a touch of a smile. "I think I know how to hang back. Far enough and you may forget I'm there."

"You have had the most practice." She stepped clear of the circle they had once more made around her. "Place yourselves around me as you must, but forgive me if I do seem to forget you are there, afterwards." She gathered acquiescence in a glance that took in each of them, then turned aside and laid her palm against the stone. "I am no longer well-used to having friends. Until I escaped here two weeks ago I had been alone half my life with no more than a young girl's memories for company. Only sometimes sight or speech with others, who I was soon made to understand might suffer for any word I spoke.''

None of them spoke now and she risked looking back, not quite meeting their eyes. "Now it seems I may never be alone again, I cannot promise always to seem at ease with the change."

"We shall respect that, Your Majesty, as we can." Michael gave her a careful smile. "I would not now fear anyone coming upon us from behind, so the rest of us may go on ahead of you. You should see only whoever hangs back a little, so you are not at any point let out of our sight. Will this serve?"

"Yes, I think so. Thank you." They shared a nod in agreement, and he stepped past her with a gesture to the others, drawing them on.

She let her gaze drift across the parapet wall, then up into the clear vault of sky above them. With the last of the light now fading over the walls to the west—except where it still reflected hints of gold through the windows of the cathedral and throne hall—it was darkening from streaked amber and blue-green into darkest blue, and the stars were coming out.

There was none of the chill tonight, though, that she had felt in the courtyard at Hammond's. The air was soft, and the scents in the night wind blowing off the land were now more complicated than the tang of the sea breeze this morning. There was still something of water and seashore in it, blowing across the bay from the southeast coast: hints of salt and the kelp that draped the rocks at the base of the seaward walls. From the north and west, across the twisted outline of the Dark Forest, she caught mustiness, a less savory drift of rot and damp. The scent of the forest amid its blighted lands, where memory still said there should be marshland, meadow, and flourishing greenwood. Though even this, tonight, seemed cleaner, like a promise of new life.

"We can go now, if you wish," William said, an arm's length behind her. She took in where the torchlight fell, and turned to the edge of that flickering circle. Lifted her head; past the acrid bite of the smoke from the burning rock oil, she caught a breath of something now, whispering of green-growth and spring. Brushing her fingertips against the dressed stone beside her, she turned to follow it.

By the time they reached the steps where the wall met the side of the North Tower, darkness had fallen so the land was no more than a shadow beneath the night sky. The moon was rising, but as yet only a slice of its waning disk shone past the roof of the High Keep. As that light fell little further into the body of the castle than the tower's soaring walls, here—once past the courtyard where the fires of the Duke's camp provided both warm light and a haze of rising woodsmoke-the walls were dark. They climbed more slowly here, Snow White setting her hand firm against the stones of the tower, to anchor herself at each step. Despite the width of the shallow stair rising before them, and the walls still flanking them shoulder-high on its inner side, there was a feeling to the whole of walking out on a bridge over water. A sensation of floating, of swaying, or that with each next step one might drift upwards higher yet, feet no longer touching the ground. A gamble she could not choose to take now, even in a dream: _too much now, I am needed to do_. But she could as surely neither stop nor go back, with the breeze freshening now before her, stronger with the scents of warm earth and greenery, and something which might be lilacs, and beyond that, the white flowers of the Hart's tree.

When she stepped round the last curve of the tower wall, into the first reach of the parapet walk, it washed over her like a season's blessing, and she sighed in release.

"Oh, that is better!" She pulled her shawl from her shoulders and stepped into the walkway, and breathed. A step further, carrying her to the gap between two merlons, and she held out her arms to draw it in. Closed her eyes and turned in place, step and step and step, letting the wind catch her hair.

"If I didn't know you could do that without getting dizzy, you would have me worried," said William. He caught the end of her shawl as it flew from her arm, and she stopped to accept it back.

"Your tone says I do, anyway," She smiled. "You have no idea how warm a lined velvet gets, indoors by a fire. Or dancing, or climbing stairs."

"I'd sooner expect you'd be cold," he said.

"Not tonight." She held out her hand, letting the air stream over it. "The air is soft tonight."

"Spring comes at last," said a voice from the shadow, smiling, and for a breath they both froze. Shared a glance and turned where the end of a staff scraped, and cloth and leather dragged against stone as the speaker slid down from a further gap . "Your doing, Lady."

"Muir?" William got it out first, and swung his torch forward to reveal the eldest of the dwarves standing a few feet away.

"Aye, Lord William?"

"How on Earth did you come here?"

"By the stair from the royal garden, on toward sunset." Muir tilted his head to give William a sidelong stare. It was a look, Snow White thought, which came closer to meeting his eyes than one would expect a blind man to manage. Reason enough for William to glance back at her, his expression unsettled, before moving to stand his ground.

"So how did you pass the three men ahead of us?"

"I didn't. They passed me." The little man glanced up to where the moon had now risen past the bulk of the High Keep. "In justice to them, it was darker at the time."

"Would light have helped them?" Snow White asked.

Muir turned his sightless gaze to her and smiled. "It might've done. I was only sitting in this low spot between the stones." He patted the edge of the gap beside him. "I guessed you would be here, soon enough."

"You did." She didn't quite smile. Perhaps she should, but she could not be any more certain than she was, of his hearing her affection. "Do you mean to make me a riddle of how?"

"Not a great one. Do you understand what brings you here, tonight?"

_Understand?_ If he had come to meet her, that might pose a thornier question than she had any clue how to answer.

"No." Snow White held out her hand to the night. "Shall I say Fate, if you knew I would come?"

"No," he said, "Not when that isn't your answer."

"Then all I can say is that I needed to clear my head." He did not move, and she sighed. "Muir, I have nearly enough not slept in four nights." She let her hand fall and turned aside again to face the breeze. Drew in a breath and sighed as it filled her like water meeting thirst. "I should be falling on my _face_." _Not so near flight instead, or drunkenness_, as the breath of land and water flowed over her, and into every empty place within. _Yet I think I have not drunk enough of anything, strong enough that I should feel like this..._ Distracted, she set her hand to the top of the merlon beside her, and brought the other to rub her forehead again, frowning.

"I've felt as though I could," she said, "and tried when I could, both on the road here, and in the day and night since.

"Either I start awake at every sound or smell—real or imagined!—or simply at the movement of people through all hours—or when all is quiet I find myself sitting up afire, mind and heart overflowing. Coming here, it was with my need to come here and see this done. That or else my certainty of what I must do, and my uncertainty of how I should do it, and being torn with imagining everything which might lie between then and now. Then yesterday, it was full with the knowledge that it was done. Since then, possessed with all my thoughts and questions and uncertainties and hope, and being again afire with every need for _this_ day."

She pulled herself straighter and stretched her free arm back, to drink a deeper breath. "All being done, an hour ago I might have said I had some hope. I rose, and found myself circled by my guards and attendants, and the cry went up again, that all should hail me to my rest! And now my mind is spinning once more, and all I can think is that in accepting I should be crowned, I may have made the worst mistake of my life."

"Mistake?" William shifted the torch in his hand, and stared at her. "I hope you don't mean that!"

"It's only a thought!" He was a good deal easier to worry now, she thought, and shook her head. "I only wish I could be more sure of having done the right thing."

"You have!" He glanced at Muir, then back to her, his distress plain. "You couldn't have done anything more right. Because in case you hadn't noticed it, Snow, you are the rightful heir, and the only one we've got!"

"I had noticed! And I'm not sure that shouldn't worry you as much as anything," she said. "I'm not sure being my father's daughter mightn't be the last and poorest reason left, for me to rule."

"Do you believe that, in your heart?" Muir asked.

"I think I hardly know!" Her shawl slipped again and she pulled it around herself, catching it on the jewelled pin still thrust through the top of her sleeve. Still holding it, turned again to gaze out at the moonlit water.

"As King," she said, "my father so _failed_ this land...and in the end, he may have suffered less for it than any of us. As his heir, I owe it to make right what I can! But coming to rule so unready, beyond wanting all to be made right?"

"Is that what you were thinking, earlier?" asked William.

"What?" She swung back to look at him. "When?"

"When you came out from your coronation," he said. "There was a moment when you looked as you do now. I didn't understand it." He stopped. "I never imagined you doubting this way."

"I wasn't, _then_." She folded her arms, brought her hand again to hold the shawl in place. _However you remember me, I must break that memory..._ "I was only thinking, that it was _done_." His expression stayed wary, and she sighed. "That I'd come to this day as I was born to come to this day—" Now as then, something in her throat tightened. "—committed my self and my life as I was always meant to do—" _And now I must go on_, "and it had all felt right, and needful, and blessed, there in the presence of everyone who helped to make it possible."

Muir shifted, leaning on his staff. "Remember that none could have done so, if you had not come to make it possible."

She nodded. "Then, as I did know what I must do next, I went to do it."

"Now what I see is that I have seen such hope in every face tonight, and such faith, and I have no idea what comes next. It's beyond me to know how I shall ever justify it! Or whether I'm even meant to, any more." She spread her hands wide. "Muir, how do I know now, that I'm not done? That Fate has not in fact made the only use it will ever make of me?"

"Through the fact that you are here." He did not move. "Both alive, and having come to this place."

"I don't think I understand."

"You are the Queen," he said, "and the spirit of the land that we would once have called the Lady has granted you a measure of her power, that you may bear it with you in the world. You cannot change what you are.

"You grieve in the moment, and doubt, and can only think instead of know, because you are young and have given too much of yourself in a very short time. But tonight you have also done, without understanding, what you most needed to do."

He held out his hand to the night. "You came here. You came to this place by the same means I did, following the smell of water and earth and the life they sustain. You came to the one place on these castle walls where at this time, the wind could bear you the breath of the Hart's forest, and the scent of the Living Tree."

"That being how you did it." Snow White followed his gaze. "Yes, I'll grant I seem to have done that."

"Now ask what you feel, as you breathe of it."

"Renewed." She considered it. "Stronger." _Stretched less thin_._ Feeling here in my heart the life force of the land, and the water, and all that lives. Greenwood and meadow, ploughed fields and river wetlands, and the mountains that rise beyond._ _People, in the scent of hearth fires, and their animals, and the creatures of the land, and birds of the air_. "Also...warned." For now too, she sensed how the smoke of charcoal burning spoke of despoiled forests, and with the sharpness of metal broken from the earth, she could feel now places where the heat of furnaces burned and bled poison. _Scents of ash and burnt bone, where the soil lies blackened and cursed_. She frowned. "There's a deal of wrong out there, to be faced."

"Which you will no longer fear, for now you feel your heart's centre, and you know to fill it at need." Muir turned, and by the serenity in his smile, she knew he saw her. "It's a good beginning, my Lady." A breath, and his smile widened. "I think you may find now, that you can sleep."

"And I shouldn't worry too much," said William, "about what comes next." He sighed. "Fact is, Snow, that we still have to win the country back for you, before any of us can truthfully speak of you ruling it. That'll be more our business—mine, and that of my men—beginning in the morning."

-o0o-

"Are you looking for me to remain within these walls, while you're away?" she asked, as they continued along the parapet. "I have an impression your father may prefer it, and I will not be surprised if Count Cerdic backs him."

"I'd appreciate if you did," William said, "but no, I'm not expecting it." He glanced down, when she reached to take his hand, lacing her fingers through his. "I—when we get back, I'd appreciate being able to know where you are, and that you're safe, as a first thing—but I expect you'll at least be out to the village, and seeing the state of the manor here."

"With you expecting to be gone between one and two weeks—" Snow White said, "Yes. I'll expect to see quite a lot of the village before you get back. I'll hope for one or two of the closer manors, as well."

"Just don't seek to change the appearance of anything too quickly, or get too far afield." His expression went thoughtful into the distance. "These next few weeks, our foremost need is to keep anyone from realizing that Ravenna has fallen, who might be moved to come against us."

She tilted her head, studying him sidelong. "Do you think anyone will be?"

"Her governors may be," he said. "Between those who came with her knowing they must fall, and the temptation there may be for those holding the greater castles to play opportunist and seek the crown themselves, I won't be surprised. If they learn of it. If anyone tells them."

"I don't think anyone will," Snow White said. She studied him, measuring the abstraction in his tone. "And anyone who comes, this next month at least, we won't be letting out."

"I'm not sure that will serve." He looked around at her. "It'll only take one rider or cart coming from elsewhere—with a supply caravan, perhaps—who doesn't return again where they're expected, to bring others looking and questioning. Then God only knows what sort of force may converge on us.

"And honestly," he went on, "I don't know what to tell you, if that should happen. Part of me says we need this castle ready for a siege, and ready to shelter as many people as we can, as soon as we may have it. The same says it would ease my mind a lot, to know you safe within these walls. I could be begging you to stay close, and set every hand we can muster to finding out what's needed, and making preparations to feed and house as many refugees as may come.

"I'm not sure, though, that will serve you." He blinked, and his gaze fell. "Because if it comes to siege here, I'd sooner you run. East up the valley, toward the fens, or west and north towards Holywell. Even into the Dark Forest again. Or striking out by boat for Cerdic's castle at Pembroke. Anywhere!" He sighed. "I'd sooner know you're not trapped." A hesitant, darting glance. "It'd give me a better chance to find you again."

"Not unlike chess," Snow White said, as they walked on. "The queen's power lies in her freedom to move." She locked her palm solid against his. "I don't want to be trapped here, either."

"I still can't believe it," he said, when they had passed the last guard-post in silence, and only the final length of walkway lay before them, before the tower from which the last set of stairs would descend to the inner court. "That you're here, alive, and Queen at last."

"Mm." She smiled a little, and William seemed to brace himself.

"I thought of you every day, after we lost you. Couldn't believe I'd found you, when we did, first—when I knew it was you, and you hadn't changed."

"What? Not at all, in eleven years?!" She slipped her arm closer against his sleeve, and did not quite laugh. "All of taller, darker, all but dressed like a boy, and at night, in the midst of a burning village?"

"I knew it was you," he said. "You hadn't changed. Not your eyes or your expression, and...you've still the same light inside you."

"Well, perhaps." She gave the faintest of shrugs. "Where I was, there was nothing to make me change, except growing." His expression grew protective at that, and she gave an internal sigh. "I won't say forgetting, but with time much of what I remembered became somewhat unreal."

"Everything?"

"A great deal." The mind's mercy, perhaps, when she had evil enough to remember. But there was something left she could give him.

"I used to wonder what had become of you," she said. "Sometimes whether you were still alive at all, but mostly what you would look like. I knew by the time I was tall enough to see out my cell door, my memories of you as a boy must be useless, but I could imagine no further. I only knew you must now be grown."

"Not entirely," he said. "On the inside much the same."

She smiled, and tightened her grip. "Do you remember us fighting, as children? Arguing, and—fighting, by times?"

"All the time. " He did laugh, at that. "What? Are you going to hold that against me, now?"

"No." She considered the tower before them, where Sir Gareth, torch in hand, had come out to wait for them. "I just think it's a good thing, if someone remembers that part."

* * *

_In this AU, when a magic user dies, their spells and geasa begin to break down. _

_Ravenna has been dead about 48 hours._

_We're on our way to finding out about the villains she's left lying around under geas...the ones that used to worry her._

_Snow gets to begin upsetting her subjects' preconceived notions, and acquires a new and dangerous admirer._

* * *

**Glossary**

**Bodhràn** \- A small hand drum. Still used quite a bit in Celtic folk music.

**Undercroft** \- While these could be above ground galleries, here they're either partly or entirely below-ground storage areas. Secured cellars for storing goods and supplies, in most cases.

**Merlon** \- Most readers will have seen pictures of castle walls with jagged tops, alternating blocks of stone with gaps between them. These are called **crenellated** walls, the blocks-and-gaps arrangement also called **crenellation**(s). Each of the blocks is a merlon. The gap between merlons is also known as a **crenel gap**.

**Geas/geasa** \- Compulsion or binding spells, eg., the sort of thing you might want on a mad ally, to prevent them from hurting you.

* * *

_**A/N** _

/ bangs head on desk.

Going as fast as I can, which is not always an encouraging thought. What's driving me craziest, is that I do have a substantial outline, here!-not completely pantsing it all-and still having trouble writing within it.


	8. Ch 08 - A Spell is Broken

**Chapter 8 – A Spell is Broken**

It was telling, thought Cian Cerul, Lord of Wyverns, that for the third morning in a week he could entertain the thought of hating his queen. His long-cherished sovereign and liege lady Ravenna: fairest of the fair, finer in her beauty as she closed on her fourth century of life, than the freshest of Sidhe maidens. This morning he was sure she had never loved him, and as sure in every part of him that he could not abide her.

It was a change like the softest whisper of spring breathed on the wind here at Dinas Uaine, where the air was more likely to be March-raw, wet and blustery until late in May. A tantalizing shadow of emotion which he had at first wondered at her allowing him. A month later and he might have suspected it as her idea of a playful enticement. Then he would have been planning his annual progress south to offer again his oaths of fealty, and the clarity now knife-edging his mind said it would been entirely within her humour to invite him with just such a sense of the desire to slaughter her—a desire he must trust would melt from his ability to dream of satisfying, by such time as he might stand within reach of her.

It was surely important that it came so early.

He scowled, and reached for the bread brought by his squire, Turlach, to break his fast after his morning's exercise in the armoury yard, tearing the flat loaf in half, and breaking it open to spread with fresh butter.

_Fealty sworn to any mere mortal? To one of Argentius' slaves? _He would have sneered if he had not known there was wonder this morning, in his ability to recognize the thought as incredible.

Even if the woman's command of time made clear she had learned much from the ancient wizard's store of magic—above all some way to maintain both beauty and her apparent, preternatural youth—this morning he could feel it a travesty he should ever have yielded so much to her.

He bit hard into the coarse bread, and took up the mug of ale Turlach had brought.

She had in her time seduced him, yes. He did still burn with simple lust at the thought of her fair beauty, bright eyes, and melting lips, and of how, each summer, it had been their custom to renew a more personal and intimate bond, when he came to her on the day of their oath-sharing. Not even the most exacting prince of the Fae could see anything in her then, to be dismayed at taking, and he had never held her as less than his lover in the time. He had felt in their union at the feast of Lugh, he did in some sense serve as king to her queen, and together they confirmed the life of the land, and the richness of harvests to come. Now it crossed his mind to wonder, if this might not always have been an aspect of the spell. For what except blight had ever followed, where the Queen of Iron ruled?

Before the gods, he would swear to no richness of any harvest in any land where she resided.

"Aid me, and I shall give you the world of my people," she had said. "A fair, green land, still charged with power, and its people to serve you. No more need to spend Sidhe magic in petty child-thievery or the pursuit of their youth—I will give you them all, in that variety and genius which so fascinates you."

Well, he would grant her the fair, green land, but not a warm one. After ten years he had trained the people of this valley to serve him as vassals should. But in recent days, with the coming of this spring, he was restless.

_A test,_ he considered, and looked round at his youngest son's entrance. He had taken Rogier with him to their last year's oath-offering, and he had at least met the Queen.

"Speak to me, Rogier, of your feeling for our liege lady."

"I would prefer not, my Lord." Rogier's lips tightened, and his expression grew wary. _Relax, boy_, Cian thought._ You are too easy to read_. This half-blood son would never have survived in the Oberon's court he had known.

"I know," he said. "This morning you understand how profoundly you hate her."

Rogier stiffened, and he held up his hand. "Ten years she has bound me, and through me, you and all my kin, but I tell you this morning, everything in my bones tells me she is fallen."

Cian turned to Turlach, and waved him forward. "Find my scryer, and tell him to meet us at the Well of Vision."

-o0o-

When they entered the vaulted pavilion sheltering the scryer's pool, Orin Farseer was already seated on the circle of black flagstones that lined its rim, studying the shifting of light within cold white haze that hung a hands-breadth over the Well, obscuring its waters.

He let his human glamour fade as Cian and Rogier descended, the soft browns of human hair, eyes and tanned skin brightening into the shining golds and ivory of his Wyvern heritage.

"A fair morning, my lord, for your summons," he said. "What would you of me?"

Cian Cerul smiled. "Show me our Queen."

Orin drew straighter at that and eyed him with sharpened attention. "Are you done with my service, my lord?"

Cian let his smile widen. "Why should you think so, my Orin?"

"The Queen is far more powerful than I, Lord Cian, and when she senses my seeing her, she is likely to understand it is I who do so." Orin spread his hands. "I do not say I will not do it, Lord! I only say either that my sight may burn for it, or I may."

"Do not fear." Cian circled the pool. "Do you understand what I suspect, when I say I woke this morning hating our beloved Queen?" Orin lifted his head—silent, but his eyes widening in a watchful question—and Cian continued. "Do you understand what you should, knowing that?"

"That her _geas_ upon you is lifted-or broken, as at death." Orin sat perfectly still, his hands resting on his thighs, then met Cian's eyes and lifted his hand, offering it. "Will you share the vision with me, my lord, so you may not only see but sense all, as I do?

"I will." Cian faced the still waters before them, and clasped Orin's hand. "I think our risks are slight." He locked his fingers through the scryer's in a grip the youth could not break. "Show me our Queen."

-o0o-

In the oratory at Castle Magnus, a soft light shimmered across the surface of the brass mirror that stood on the festival altar, then faded and was gone.

-o0o-

"It looks well enough," said Lady Marjorie, adjusting the rosette of black velvet stitched into the shoulder of Snow White's left sleeve. "But must you, my lady? As a piety it may do you credit, but I promise no one else will be wearing any mark of mourning before Queen Ravenna's pyre."

"Yes, I think I must," said Snow White. "I feel in my heart I must...something." She lifted her arm at Marjorie's directing touch, so her new Mistress of the Queen's Wardrobe could twist the long tails that fell from from the rosette into neat spiral cords, looping back under her arm and up again, so Greta could stitch them into the underside of it.

"For _her_?" The pretty blonde sighed. "You're a better Christian than I am."

"Not so much." She smiled, small and tight. _Just now, I think the Archbishop would question my being a Christian at all, and I hardly know what to answer him._ "It's more that I did kill her."

"And you regret it?" Marjorie shook her head. "You'll be the only one who does!"

"Then I'll be the only one who does!" She lifted her chin, lips set, then echoed the headshake. "Having to kill anyone, Marjorie—it's a stain on the soul. It needs not to go without acknowledgement."

"Even if I don't greatly regret it," she went on, "because in the end, no, there was no choice." Greta snipped free her thread, and Snow White turned to check the results in the mirror. "No. I should say that the ribbon is more for my father, King Magnus, and the lives we once hoped to live." She bowed her head. "The lives we might have lived, if there had been anything still alive in Ravenna, of the woman I have to believe she must once have been. The woman she seemed at first."

In their reflection she caught Greta's quick, carefully blank look at Marjorie, and the more wary one Marjorie cast back at her, and sharpened her tone a little before she turned. "And you may say as much to anyone who asks! I will say further—trust I do understand! I am unlikely to ever feel as free again, to show any sort of remembrance for either of them, as I do today."

"My father, especially." She drew a slow, careful breath past the tightness that gathered in her throat on saying the words. "I may lack a great deal in experience, but I do know what it means when I ask if anyone knows what was done with his body, that eyes flick aside and lips set, and none will say more than 'I do not know, Majesty!'" She shook her head. "No one may know, but they suspect: nothing good or worthy of his state. I understand too, when they dare to risk looking at me again, how clearly they could not care less about the answer."

"Ten years is a long time to care," Marjorie said, "when so few still live who have any basis for knowing anything."

"Anything beyond that he let the Devil in the door," Snow White said. She gave the other girl an oblique look. "He is blamed for a fall I doubt he could help—but as I cannot prove it, I must refuse to blame anyone who has suffered, if they now choose to hate him. I understand it will not serve me to antagonize anyone by seeking any better remembrance for him than he has."

Marjorie nodded, and took the scissors to trim the final ribbon they had left to hang forward over her shoulder. "However unjust it feels, that's probably wise. So you will have this, today." She glanced up, blue eyes seditious, and one gold eyebrow twitched. "_May_ I share as well, that we cut the ribbons for it from one of Her Late Majesty's more appalling velvet ball-gowns?"

"Yes." Unintended, Snow White smiled. "Be sure you tell our laundress, Mistress Coyle. That will have the story all through the castle by sunset."

She raised her eyes, as a tap came at the door. "I should say now I am ready. Unless anyone else needs time to attend hair or hemlines, it is time to have this done."

-o0o-

"I cannot see within the castle walls." Orin frowned and sketched a flat circle with his hand at the edge of the haze. He watched as it dispersed, leaving the contents of the pool a clear, flat silver. "Something prevents me—but let us see what may be seen."

He touched a finger to his forehead, turned it, and stabbed it into the waters before him, so that ripples spread, circling from his touch.

When the ripples faded, an image of the Queen's castle lay before them, towering above the headland it engulfed. Not quite as bleak as usual, Cian thought. With the brightness of a spring morning to warm its stones, and no winter's storm wind to whip the green waters of the bay into smoking spray amidst the outcrops of jagged rock that dotted the scythe- arc of beach running almost to its gate, one could even find some grace in its eccentric whole.

Then he saw the people, moving in a thin wave along the road between castle and village, beginning to spill down from the heights above the beach.

"Something is happening," he said. There had been no sign given from the castle, but something had them moving, the more agile climbing in haste down through the rocks towards the shore, running, seeking places to climb again amidst those lining the water. Seeking a better vantage on what he now saw. "_Ahhh_..."

In the stretch of pale sand before the last gap in the rocks, a shallow square trench had been dug in the sand, and in its centre stood a pyre built of clean white logs, filled with blackened brush.

"A pyre," said Orin.

"Yes," Cian said, and smiled.

A procession was emerging now from the open gate, led by four men in the the leather and chain mail of royal soldiers, bearing a stretcher draped in red. No, Cian realised: made with a red drape, which as Orin's vision drew in upon it, he could see was soot-stained and fraying, and matched that which wrapped the bundle borne upon it. Following came a young woman in a white dress with a black mourning rosette wrapping her shoulder, long black hair swinging in a loose braid to her waist, and a crown set firm upon her brow. At her heels, a group of women in brighter dresses, one veiled. Beyond them a larger group of men and women, a few by their dress priests and other religious, and others noble, but the greater number no more than ordinary folk in the dull colours of peasant garb.

"Well, there's your answer," Cian Cerul said. "The Queen is no longer Ravenna. Now draw nearer, Orin, if you can, that I may see her."

"I can bring us to the pyre," Orin said, and the vision slipped, shifting closer.

By the time their viewpoint had settled at a man's head height near the base of the square in the sand, the men who bore the stretcher had placed their burden on the branches bracing the top of the lattice of logs, and withdrawn the poles.

"Boar spears." Cian slipped to one knee, and smiled, as two of the men advanced to face the woman in white, at the corners of the square. The other two had stopped by the head of the pyre, each resting one hand on the drape that shrouded its contents. "I think some theatre is planned, here..."

Before them, the crowned woman turned to survey the crowd now closing around them, and said in a contained voice, "Let us begin."

"A week ago," she cried, clear and louder, "I made you a promise! I gave you my word that I would kill my stepmother, and free this country from her blighting rule! That being done, we are gathered today to witness the burning of her body and the scattering of her ashes into the sea, that the tides may carry her far from these shores. She being no Christian, this shall be done with no ceremony beyond the bearing of witness that it is she who lies before us now!"

She pointed to the edge of the trench in the sand.

"I call now upon any who knew the sight of her in life, to come and say if this is her!"

She lifted her head, her expression for a moment grim. "You will find her much changed! But before I set the torch to her pyre, I will have this witness borne!"

A gesture then, and the two men by the pyre drew back the wrapping covering the body. Each then turned to face those before him, set the butt of his spear into the sand beside his foot, and pushed out his arm to make a barrier with it.

"Oh, theatre indeed," said Cian. "They may come and look, but no indignities will be permitted."

The woman stepped forward and cried again, "Is this Ravenna?"

"It is," he murmured. "And you must be grateful for any prepared to say 'yes' now, being presented with her in such a state."

-o0o-

It took some time for them all to come out from the crowd in answer to her call. Easier for those gathered on her right hand, where the castle folk had ordered themselves by rank, and those standing nearest were those she knew. From among the nobles, Duke Hammond, Sir Thomas, and most of her father's knights. From within her own party, Greta and Ravenna's serving-maids, the now-restored Alys, Rose, and Elspeth. Too, there had come a scattering of other castle servants. Even Goody Coyle and her husband, she saw, came pushing through to look upon what was left of their once-mistress.

From her left, where most had descended from the bluffs above, the line stood thinner: Count Cerdic and one or two of the other knights overseeing the camp by the road, and a few the village folk. The rest, she realised, however curious they might be, had never seen Ravenna in life. _And for those who have, I _have_ set a challenge_, she thought. _As William warned, there's little left to burn._ Even here in the moist air of the seaside, in the two days since Ravenna's fall, her body had parched to a husk the colour of dried leaves, from which the flesh was now flaking to reveal dried bone. But for Snow White the straw-white hair would do, to tell her who this was. That and the shining black dress, glossy as armour, or a beetle's shell.

Snow White waited until all who came had looked, and stood waiting. "Is this she?"

Cries of "It is!" and "Yes!" and "Aye, Majesty!" resounded, and she gestured to Sir James and Sir Gareth.

"Cover her."

Sir Michael had come up on her right, drawn sword in one hand and a flaming brand in the other. She held out her hand to take the fire from him and stepped down into the trench. Walked forward, steady on the packed damp sand, her arm outstretched to keep the flame safely clear of all about it. Stopped so James and Gareth might face her, waited, inclining her head in acknowledgement as each bowed, then moved to take up position at his corner of the square. A breath, a last step, and then bending, she thrust the torch between the logs, deep into its centre.

The oil-soaked brush caught quickly, and she pushed the torch hard through the space between the logs, then fell back a step. Straightened as the flames ran its length, and turned. Four steps back to the rim of the trench, and one up, and a turn again, careful not to slip as the drier sand broke under her boot. Behind her, Anna offered a steadying hand at her elbow, and she gave a brief glance of thanks.

_And so the needs of honour are met_, she thought, and drew herself straighter. Now they need only wait.

The fire was catching fast, crackling as it climbed the packing of brush inside the logs, and wisps of dirty smoke began to seep through its sides and top. Then more than wisps, and the sharp smells of rock oil and pitch. Someone had chosen to take no chances of this fire not catching fast enough. From the blackness of it now, she could guess that was why the brush packing had stood so dark against the stripped logs.

From somewhere too, there drifted...something that caught at her nose like the contents of a garderobe bucket. Some outflow from the castle sewers? She frowned, then schooled her expression blank. No, those all opened on the seaward side of the castle, as few knew as well as she. There was a fire-warmth to the odour, too, which made her blink_. But how in God's name would anyone get _that_ to burn?_

Beside her, Marjorie suppressed a snort and pressed a hand to her lips.

"What?" Snow White asked, not moving. Both Catherine and Lisl had caught it as well. She all but felt them exchanging glances before Lisl ducked her head to muffle a giggle. Even Anna pulled her veil to her lips and turned aside, and she did look round at that. "_What?_"

"Someone's added—call it a bucket or two of rubbish, to that brush," said Anna.

Marjorie buried her face in her hand. "Mostly dry, off the stable dungheap!"

"Some fresher from the kitchens, I suspect." said Anna.

Lisle snickered outright and Anna went on, still holding her veil to conceal her laughter. "And forgive me—I _promise_ my Jeff left town yesterday!"

Snow White gave it up and stared at her. "You're not saying _he'd_ have—?"

"We can talk about it later!"

Behind her the giggles were catching, and she snapped round again to stare back at the pyre, fighting the urge to pull her hand to her face. _Oh, my God, the indignity... _

Flickers of flame had begun to show beneath the folds of the banner which formed the stretcher, and with the rising heat, the smoke streamed faster upward, thicker and more noisome. Around the cleared space there was a general drawing back at that, and along with a few people coughing, she could now catch snatches of conversation.

"Stink worse than a midden, 'innit," said a woman, and there were murmurs about her, and the sharp cries of a few children, "Aye!"

"Somethin' off a dungheap…"

"—black, like that?"

"Rock oil," said a man, and snorted. "Colours that smoke like the witch's soul."

"Fitting," muttered a woman, and there were other murmurs of agreement.

Snow White drew in a sigh and tilted her head back to gaze up at the expanding black column. _Was it too much that anyone might seriously_ consider _what I might want, in this? Ravenna was still my stepmother, and for the sake of the woman she must once have been, and for the sake of my father's choosing her—surely it demeans us all, to deny her corpse as little as an unpolluted burning!_

Mercy at least, that she could know Eric was not here. She could not imagine his respecting any of what she felt now for either Magnus or Ravenna, or how she had ever wished any of this might have turned out differently. It would have hurt to feel the anger and revulsion she knew in his regard for both of them, extending to contempt for her in the truth of her regrets. To feel again her certainty that in his own more ruinous pain he could have no sympathy for hers, and that in truth she had much less to grieve for.

She, after all, had survived. Fed, clothed, and sheltered, she might even say protected as no one else in the kingdom, through Ravenna's twisted performance of a mother's duty. _Because I still believe she did feel something that denied her will to kill me. That something in the child I was did stay her hand, and I still owe her recognition for that much humanity._

_So I _will_ have this much_, she thought. _I have earned a right as much as anyone here, to grieve for my dead and my hopes._

But thought still nagged: _but _ _how much of what I have believed, shall I still call true?_

_Where does my father lie?_

_Did she grant him even as much as a burial?_

She blinked again before another stinking drift of smoke. Closed her eyes a moment, and almost swayed, as something seemed to cut adrift within her. _Truth is that she murdered him. He loved her, and—_

"My lady?" Greta caught her at the back, arm bracing her elbow.

"Your Majesty?" On her other side, Marjorie caught her arm. "Are you well?"

**_No_**_._

She opened her eyes and shifted her stance, steadying herself.

"Yes—" A half step and a touch to slide Marjorie's fingers away, and then let her hand fall, her arm swinging so that Greta's hold loosened, and she stared again into the fire.

_Truth is that he never loved her._

She lifted her head, jaw setting in sudden, hard certainty_. He never loved her. There was no _time_ for love between them! No more than for sympathy born of his kindness, and whatever she bespelled him to feel, that he might wed her. And then within hours, she murdered him._

Then after, was it not as much Finn's doing, that she had lived? There was too little in all those years that followed, that spoke of the Queen even remembering her.

_Until she decided to cut out my heart. _

The freshening breeze whipped her skirt around her legs and she caught it at her side, fist clenching in its folds.

_We were wrong. _

_Anything my father or I ever imagined Ravenna to be, she was _not!_—and I can only now believe had ceased to be in any measure, long before we ever knew her. _

_She fell on us like a wolf. _

_ And I can never be sure now either, that my father did _not_ yield to her willingly. For what could have drawn him to her more powerfully than hope, that in what she promised lay the end to his grief? _

_For surcease from the pain of my mother's loss, how far did he set aside reason, and so betray us all?_

_No certainty now except that nothing I might ever have hoped for us, could ever have been...and I am a fool now, if I mourn for fantasy._

The fire had caught the greater mass of the mouldering banners now, flames rising at last to engulf the bundled corpse, and in the general gasp at that, and then the moment's breathless hush, she let go her skirt and reached for the rosette at her shoulder. Thread cut at her fingers as she found the stitches tacking it to her sleeve, and snapped them, hard.

"Your Majesty, what are you doing?!" Marjorie caught her shoulder and Snow White pulled away .

"I can't _do _this," she said. It felt as though the seam at the back of her sleeve had opened, and she froze. "Keep my sleeve from tearing off, if you can?" Marjorie held the satin in place as she kept tearing stitches, until the rose knot came free in her hand. She stripped the loops of ribbon from her arm, gathered them together, and looked towards the fire. "Can't," she repeated, "when the truth is that I have nothing left to mourn."

She drew her arm free again from Marjorie's grip, stepped down again into the sunken square, and strode forward to fling the rose knot into the flames.

There was a murmur at that which she ignored, turning on her heel to return to her place. A sharp cracking stopped her, and cries from the crowd, and she whirled as more than one woman screamed and at least one man shouted in warning, "It's going!"

The lower support for the body, she saw, had given way. It was tilting, seeming to stand, and for a breath she stood open-mouthed. For a moment saw once more the outline of a woman wrapped in flames, seeming almost to writhe within that wrapping. Then with another crack, the upper support gave way as well, and the bundle sank down on itself and vanished in the flames.

"Oh, God, we are free—Ravenna is gone at last!" and that cry echoed, and another was taken up: "All hail the Queen!" Snow White straightened, drew breath in a sigh as it rose and spread, and stepped up again, to take Greta's and Marjorie's hands.

"I think I'd have less hailing of me, and more care of each other," she said to them. Stopped again, and looked up to where a man came slipping down the rocky path behind them. "Oh! and Anna—you may hope that man of yours is not about to make a liar of you."

-o0o-

"If she is now talking to bumpkins from the crowd," Cian said, "I think we have nothing further to learn, for now." He released Orin's hand, and turned aside, began to pace around the well. "She is young. Evidently the last king's daughter. Fair, if you like them dark-haired, and powerful enough, to have—" he stopped, and swung round to stare at them. "She did say she had _killed_ Ravenna? Promised, and then killed her?"

"She did," said Orin. "But how, my lord? If the Queen's magic was proof against yours, Master of Wyverns, what must this girl be to defeat her?"

"I do not know," said Cian. "Yet." He bent his head in thought. "Rogier, send to each of your brothers, and to my brother Lorcan, with word of what we have seen, and that my order for the moment is 'Hold, and prepare for war'. I go this night to learn what has happened, and gauge the power of the girl to whom she has fallen."

* * *

_Snow gets on with being Queen of a country she does not yet rule, and learns just how short-lived the secret of Ravenna's fall now promises to be._

* * *

**Glossary**

**Wyvern** \- A form of dragon which has forelimb wings and only hind legs. A full dragon has four legs and wings extending from its back as well.

* * *

The big delay on this one turned out to be due to me buying a _house_...

Still writing!


	9. Ch 09 - Plans and Decisions

"I will never understand," Snow White said, from inside the sheath of heavy satin pulling tight about her shoulders, "how on Earth they ever got me into this dress, when they thought I was dead!"

"I don't know," said Lady Marjorie, "I wasn't there, and Dame Elizabeth said only you were softer than asleep, throughout."

"Not _being_ dead." She edged back, pulling harder against Lisl's and Greta's grip on her skirt, and sighed, feeling a seam give way further. "Oh, for Heaven's _sake_…"

"I expect it helped too, that it wasn't halfway _damp_." Marjorie came to work the torn sleeve around her arm. "There, now try." She stepped back as Snow White shifted and braced herself for another pull. "My lady, you hadn't even a cloak this morning, and this wasn't any more than a bridal under-gown to start with. Were you not freezing?"

"No worse than a little cool." With the rip of a few more stitches the dress released her, and Snow White stumbled backwards and pulled herself up. "No!—'freezing' would be Hammond's courtyard at midnight, in bare feet." Greta held her out a fresh tan shift, its neckline gathered with green ribbon, and she swept it over her head, shaking it out around her. "Oh, that's better." She made to tie the ribbon and collided with Greta's move to do it for her. "Sorry—it's only been years since I've had anyone trying to dress me." She ducked under the skirts of the blue wool gown Catherine held up for her, drew it down around her, and shot her cuffs through its sleeves while the dark girl snugged its back lacing. "Ohh, yes, much better." She smiled at her rumpled image in the mirror. "These days, I'll take warm and clean above anything."

"We must find you something better for the memorial on Sunday. Something with more substance, more regal." Marjorie came to lift her hair back, and gestured her towards the chair before her mirror. "Here, my lady, sit down and we'll have Greta fix your hair."

"I saw a blue and violet brocade in one of those chests we opened," she went on, "which would make a fine loose gown over the grey silk we found, the one from your mother. That's unless you'd prefer violet or something darker, more in keeping with royal mourning."

"I'd sooner plain wool for now," said Snow White. She bowed her head against the pull of Greta's comb, and considered it. "Anything dull and warm that I can still run and ride in, if I should need to." She glanced round carefully. "All I likely need for now is a skirt split for riding, made short enough not to catch the mud when I'm walking about in the village."

"Still," said Marjorie, "we need something more complete and finer for you, for Sunday. We need to make you look a proper Queen."

"I think the crown will do that," said Snow White. "Let's just say warm? Dark skirt and jacket, perhaps? Split skirts for riding, short enough to stay clear of the mud? Though—" She stopped. "A thought, let me speak with Duke Hammond first. He may ask I wear my armour again, and if he does, that decides most of it."

"Armour!" said Marjorie, and drew her hand to her eyes. "Oh, my lady, I shall hope not!" When Snow White no more than flicked a sideways glance at her, she let it fall and came to face her more squarely. "Your Majesty, having made me your mistress of wardrobe, please do not tell me now you have no taste for pretty clothes, or will prefer plate steel and leather to the finery fitting for the queen you are now become."

"No—" Feeling Greta begin to work the braid below her shoulders, Snow White risked a careful half turn. "Not at all. I don't think—" _But can you understand how unimportant this all feels, just now?_ Her gaze went unbidden to the crown still sitting on the chest beside her mirror. "But not for this. Greta, are you done?" Greta drew the cord tight around the ends of her hair, knotting it neatly, and she sighed again. "I think it may be some time before I feel any need for more, myself, than being warm enough."

Marjorie stepped back, lips pursed, dipping her a curtsey, and on impulse she turned.

"Though if you are moved to be inventive, Marjorie, you might also do worse than consider the clothes I came to Hammond's wearing. I won't recommend alterations with an ax, but the length my Huntsman left me with, over my hose, was more than enough to let me do anything I might need."

"Oh, Lord," said Marjorie, and rubbed her eyes. "My lady, have you no sense of _anything_ proper to your state?!"

"Not much." There came a tap at the door, and Snow White rose, and bit down a smile. "Enjoy it while it lasts…"

She beckoned when Lady Helen poked her head around the door. "What is it, Lady Helen?"

"Your Majesty, Sir Mark is outside with a party of guardsmen. He wants to know if you wish to oversee their removal of Ravenna's mirror to the royal library."

"No, though you may thank him for the thought," she said. "He knows where I want it. Down the aisle past the bookcases, to the right of the worktable I've asked be set there for my use. There's a chest at the south end of the aisle below the oriel window, where it can sit." She frowned. "I don't quite trust it out of my sight, but I don't want to look at it every day, either."

"I shall tell him," Helen said.

"Only wait! If he'll stay a little, I'll walk to the chancery block with them. I need to speak with Duke Hammond and the others about what we are to do next, and also see my crown back to the strong-room." She swept it up and looked round. "Can someone pass me a pillowcase?"

"Pillowcase, Your Majesty?"

"Pillowcase." She held up the crown, and pointed. "Crown." They all traded startled looks, and she let her eyes widen. "What? Ladies, I'm not carrying it out in the open!"

"Uh, but don't you have to wear it, Your Majesty?" asked Catherine.

She risked a grin, at that. "No, not when it's not a formal occasion. Being royal doesn't mean you have to wear your crown all the time." She bounced it lightly in her hand. "Pillowcase?"

"As discreet a veil as any," said Lady Helen, and smiled. "Then when you are happy with the bundle, I will pray you give it me so as mistress of your household I may trot along behind, and you go unburdened." Snow White tilted her head and saw mischief in the quirk of Helen's lips. "I also have a question or two for the Duke, and others for your treasurer."

-o0o-

"You do know, Your Majesty, if you want to hear Duke Hammond's plans, you need only call him to attend you?" Mark cast a wary glance around as they came through the arched gate between the royal yard and second court, and strode forward to place himself between her and Lady Helen, and the rest of the busy yard.

"What, in my chambers?" Snow White regarded him with deliberate innocence. "At the moment that's taken over by my women, deciding how to dress me on Sunday."

"Well, no," he said, and smiled. "Your chambers are more of a place to be private." The guardsmen bearing the mirror, she saw, had also moved to one side, so as to block the common view of them as they walked. "But you know you might command any of us to attend you anywhere you like."

"So I might." Now they were bringing more of the people who had followed them within the castle gates, there were fewer faces she recognized among the bustle of men and women, and children now of all ages, at work in the second courtyard, and she quickened her pace. "But it isn't enough, Sir Mark, for me only to hear from him. I need to learn from him as well, and the others. I need to understand their decisions, hear their discussion and ask my own questions, and not only wait to be reported to."

A few people now, glimpsing her, waved, and she waved back, and she was unsurprised when Beith appeared at her heels, as they reached the chancery steps.

"Hello, Beith, were you looking for me?"

"Only if you want I should be, Your Majesty," he said. "I just got wind that Nion is in making a pest of himself with Lord Peter, and I mean to put a stop to it."

"Is this over my 'weight in gold' promise?" she asked. "The one I did mean should apply to all of you?"

"That's the one!" Beith shook his head. "I'm no' having it, Your Majesty, not after Gort and I told him to give over about it, and I know Muir and the others are with us."

"I'm not sure you should!" Snow White stared at him. "Beith, I did promise, and it's not as though you haven't all more than earned it."

He gave her a dark look from under his shaggy brows. "And we will no more be paid for serving as we have, Your Majesty, than any other self-respecting man of this land should be paid for aiding in the freeing of it!" He raised a hand as she made to speak. "We'll not be made lesser citizens in this by being paid, Your Majesty, and that's final."

"You've also been as surely robbed through the taking of your mines—not to mention the destruction of your homes and loss of your people—"

"And how should gold repay such losses?" He snorted and swung up the steps past her, into the chancery. "Each of us still wears a fortune amidst his clothes, which most of your subjects cannot say, and we can well afford to wait for any such aid or recompense as in time you may offer all."

She chased him up the steps and into the foyer. "Your jewels aren't that sellable, or you'd never have been lurking in the bushes looking to rob people!"

"An' the end of it is I've told Nion to give over, and he'll do as I say!—especially when we're all the rest agreed on it." He spun, made her a bow, and headed for the passage towards the treasury.

Snow White sighed and looked back at the others. "Lord, he's stubborn! But we'll say more of this later." She moved aside and brought a finger to rub her forehead. A small knot seem to dissolve under the pressure, and she sighed again before waving Mark's party towards the library doors. "Go on, Sir Mark. You know where I want the mirror, and I'll likely look in at the library after I've seen the Duke, and you, Helen, may join us whenever you are done with Lord Peter yourself."

-o0o-

The stairs did feel different today as she ascended. Shallower, easier to climb than ever for the child she had been, whenever she had sought that world of her father's duty and service. By the ringing of voices and the passage and clatter of armed men and ledger-burdened clerks moving through the gallery at the head of the staircase, it was well on its way to being restored above her.

"Hail the Queen!" shouted one of the armsmen flanking the door to the royal workrooms, and she flinched as every head turned.

"Ye-ess." She drew herself up as they pulled the doors open, and twitched the beginning of a smile at the man who had shouted, who was now showing the grace to look uneasy. "Well, it's protocol," she said, "and we'll all have to bear it—well done, sir!" She raised her voice enough to be heard further, and went on, "Everyone be as you were. I'm only here to learn, not to make trial of anyone."

At the table before the high windows facing on the second courtyard, Duke Hammond looked up from the thick rolls of parchment he and those around him were studying, and for a breath, in the silence of that look, she was reminded of her father. So he might have stood then, caught in abstracted surprise at her stopping to see him there, until she might have curtsied and run on, intent on wherever she was going. Beside him Count Cerdic, reading over a clerk's shoulder, was murmuring to Sir Thomas and James of Anglesey some commentary on its contents, and there flanking him, still dark and saturnine, was Count Geraint of Midwald, with his kinsman, Sir Michael. She had seen Geraint there, too, before, by times studying volumes, or letters from abroad, with her father.

_All so much younger, then._

Other rolls and ledgers lay in stacks across the table before them, and the Duke's secretary was ordering slips of paper with numbers on them, directing clerks, some in monks' habits, to go and pin them to Master Ambrose's map. Master Ambrose himself was still working on it, she saw, perched on a short ladder at its side. He was adding detail to the mountains spanning from northern Wales to the Dublin valley, while below him Gort stood with head tilted back, directing him with a long pointer. At the end of the worktable, another monk was transcribing the secretary's totals into a ledger, and adding more numbers as he clicked through the beads on an abacus.

"Your Majesty," said Duke Hammond, laying a string of weights across the parchment, and coming to meet her. "How may we serve?"

"I expect best, Your Grace, by all continuing in what they are doing," she said. "You look to have a good deal in train. May I understand it?"

"I think so," he said. "We look to learn what we can from the records kept by Ravenna's people, which may tell us how our enemies are disposed." He followed as she came to scan the parchment-laden table. "Tax rolls, accounts for the army—I wish to know as soon as we may, who governs each of the castles we must retake to call the land yours again, and what forces each holds. How many knights and archers, what manors each governs, and what strength of men and resources we may hope to find in each" He indicated the map. "As we learn anything we add it to the map, so all may see the larger pattern."

Snow White considered it and then him. "How much more does it tell us, than we already know?"

He gave her a smile which did not deny her unspoken question. "No great deal as yet. Its promise is that as each adds what he knows, it makes our best understanding general."

She nodded and went to stand beneath it, let her hands fall to smooth her skirts. "What I know here and now is the same as two days ago—we only hold about a quarter of these lands. That includes both those which William and his men are seeking even now to win back for us, and such places as the Dark Forest and the dwarves' territory in the mountains, which are no man's land for now.

"I know our time to act unhindered can only be short." She turned to face the group around the table. "At this time of year, no one has supplies to last for long. Even here, stocked for siege, I know from Lord Peter we could not keep everyone who has come to us for more than three months—though it may matter little, when however we call upon the service of my subjects, it cannot be more than a month or two at most, before any force we muster must be released to attend to their crops and harvest. If we do otherwise, all will face famine next winter.

"Then I see how many places we must still count as being held by Ravenna's lords and governors, and it seems to me that we soon must ride to take back the rest."

"Not so many as you see," said the Duke. "By God's mercy, not nearly so many."

"How not?"

"We are learning that Ravenna never had enough to serve her, to hold all you see." He looked to his companions. "By our reckoning, when she fell upon us it was with an army we do not now think numbered more than eight hundred men."

"Or five or six hundred true men," said Geraint. "The first two or three hundred we met with were no more than black glass and magic."

"Then she kept at least two hundred bound close in her service here." Hammond turned back to her. "So by our reckoning she never had more than four hundred vassals she might reward through the granting of lands to them—and she seems never to have assigned governance of a castle unless to a warband of either ten or twenty. We have not yet named them all, but such numbers hold the number of places we must retake, to between twenty and forty."

"This is not to say we will only face so many at each place," Geraint added, as she considered it. "Your Majesty, once Ravenna understood most of us would sooner die than serve her, she soon ceased to call for levies of men, or tribute in arms. She satisfied herself with charging crippling shield-taxes against us, as against the monasteries which had no means to provide armed men, and so long as we could raise anything of value with which to pay it, used those instead to hire her army."

"We may expect bought men at most fortresses," said Sir Michael, at his shoulder. "Excuse me, my lord." Geraint nodded, and Michael bowed to her. "Certainly in the castles of Midwald, my lady, Sir Mark and I have secretly seen companies of archers and men-at-arms from everywhere from Dublin to Genoa."

"To Morocco," added Geraint. "After ten years, I should also count a few more places held by less steadfast souls than we, who saw opportunity in serving the Queen, if better men could not resist her."

"So call it four hundred men and some we face, and mercenaries, and some number more we may not trust." Snow White sighed and rubbed her forehead. "It's still enough, if we have no more than three hundred now!"

She lowered her hand and studied them a moment. "Now tell me—praying William and his men succeed in giving us back the fortresses they ride against, will we not need as many soldiers as we find holding them, to garrison them again? It seems to me that even if we are so fortunate as to see none wounded or killed, if every victory costs us ten or twenty experienced men to secure it after—when we've but three hundred to start with, how is this to be done?"

"It will likely take more," Count Cerdic said. "As heeding the laws of chivalry, we may not slay all those who do not fall before us—"

"No, we may not!" She stared at him, and he nodded acquiescence.

"—we must imprison, feed, and care for them until such time as we are ready to either ransom or release them." He looked to Hammond. "However long it is, until we are ready to have the whole world know what has passed, here."

"Not before Midsummer, if I may prevent it." The Duke shook his head. "News of Ravenna having fallen will bring our neighbours sniffing round our borders as soon as it is breathed. I would prefer they learn nothing of it until it is too near their own harvest-time for them to send armies with their ambassadors."

"Even if we might stand their help?" Snow White sighed and folded her arms. "I know, Your Grace, you have said this before, but my memories are of there having been peace in my father's time with all our neighbours. I still find it hard to believe they will not rejoice with us, and be done."

"Oh, doubt not there will be rejoicing," said Cerdic, "but trust all will see opportunity in it, for the strongest. How many do you think, Your Majesty, will not hear of your accession and think, 'This new queen can be little more than a child,' and be moved to greed?"

"For my land?"

"For anything they see as capable of being claimed through force of arms or legalism, or through an alliance with you, yourself," said the Duke. "I promise the peace you remember was founded on their knowing our strength, and today, they would find it wanting."

Her turn to look down and sigh, against the certainty in his eyes. "I must grant you are likely to know better, in this." She drew in a breath, and gestured. "But how can we hope to win through? If we begin out-numbered, and our forces must shrink to maintain each victory?"

"Once we know the disposition of both the castles Ravenna's men still hold," he said, "and the manors they have ruled only through fear of her, we may look to draw upon those manors as we go." He looked again at the map, and then at her. "Count the castles we must retake against a hundred smaller fortresses, and twice as many lesser fortified manors, each of which owes a duty to bring at least one knight and two or three armsmen to the king's service, should there be need. If we can muster a third of these as we go, the odds are with its being enough."

"Then surely the sooner we ride to summon them—" She glanced round, as the doors swung again, and Beith and Sir Mark and Lady Helen entered, Nion trailing them, then back again to him. "Surely there will never be greater need, than now!"

"Not 'we'," he said.

"No?"

"No, because we have now seen what would happen, and it will not serve our need." This time his gaze did not waver from hers, and gentle as his tone was pitched, she realised it was meant for the whole room to hear. "We may trust now that the people will flock to any banner you raise—but what lies before us is not a war to be won by such an army.

"I will not now say we regret any who rose to follow as we went, but it is vital we not see it happen again. For even if we had everything we might need in food and fuel, cover or shelter for those on the march, and fodder for the animals needed to bear it—and the men, as long as we might need them to stand in siege of every fortified place which would have time to lock its gates against us, in certainty of seeing us coming—" He drew in a sigh and again shook his head, all but imperceptible. "The worst is that if we were to ride forth now, even with only those who have come to us so far as our army, we would ravage our own lands in the doing, as cruelly as any invader."

"But what, then, are we going to do?" Snow White matched his gaze. "If we do not carry word to the people that the time is come to rise and fight, and they may now hope to win the day—how is it to happen?"

"By nightfall," he said, "we will know where it will best serve us to carry it, and how." He looked again to the map, and back to her. "By land or sea, mounted or on foot, and the guises in which our agents may travel less noticed. By dawn tomorrow, we shall be choosing from those who have come to us, parties of three to four and five skilled and trusted men each, who will by Sunday have begun to scatter, bearing the word you are come."

"Their task will be to find the best remaining of your subjects as they can, those who have never known benefit of Ravenna's rule, and bid them prepare for our coming.

"Learn the means by which those who rule them keep themselves safe, and how these may be thwarted. Learn by what means news travels among them, and how it may be prevented. Learn where and how they obtain their vital goods, and how these may be stopped. Prepare whoever may be found in each place to gain access wherever is secured, by every subtle means to spy out and weaken their defenses, so when such bands as William's are ready to take them, this may be done with all speed."

She nodded, and turned for her own thoughtful look. "And what of those who may already know of us?" There had been no roads marked on the map when she had last seen it, but now the dark lines tracing from Castle Magnus seemed to point like an arrow to the west, and something nagged at the edge of thought.

"Who—?" There was a shifting among them, and she looked back to meet puzzled faces.

"Your Majesty," said Count Geraint, "why should you think that any do?"

"Because they knew we were coming! From the night of my awakening—Ravenna must have known." She stopped, and realisation fell into place. "Three days. We've had men patrolling from here to the Dark Forest almost all that time, but I've heard of no skirmishes, no pursuits."

"There've been none," said Hammond. "Your Majesty, what are you thinking of?"

"Supply caravans!" she said. She turned. "Heavy carts, horse-drawn, with iron-shod wheels." Certainty hardened. "My lords, I might see _nothing_ from my prison here in the North Tower, but there were trains of heavy carts rolling through the forecourt, every secondor third day. Shouting, sometimes, from above the gates…" She looked back at the map. "High Ridge. Iron Harbour."

Still gripping the edge of the worktable, the Duke tilted back his head and sighed. "Oh, sweet Jesu. Yes. We know they knew we were coming, and however little the Queen may have cared—" He stared from Cerdic to Geraint, to Sir Michael. "If we account whoever stood in command of her troops as any less than a complete fool, he will surely have sent word no more caravans should come for a time."

"By any carters he'd ready to leave…" said Cerdic.

"Couriers, scouts, any messengers he could mount!" Hammond's jaw set. "And they are now almost certainly on their way _back_." There were murmurs at that, as he turned back to Snow White. "You are right, Your Majesty, and we must pray your forgiveness for we seem to have missed both facts."

She nodded. "I think we all did. What now?"

He raised a hand and looked to his men, forestalling. "Sir Michael, seek out my lord marshall and say to him from me, this is something we have overlooked—that we have all managed to distract ourselves from remembering!—and an error we must amend with all speed.

"Tell him I would have two mounted archers ride at once to join each of the patrols we have placed to watch the roads from the west, and the same to each party we send out henceforward. Also bid them stand further along the road, beyond any place where vantage may be gained to see as much as the smoke from this castle."

"Tell him also to add at least two extra horses to each patrol, which may be held fresher near the road, against the need either to pursue any who come, or ride in warning, if there is need." He lowered his hand. "Expecting they will not have gone further than the last fortified places to which caravans may be turned back, or held waiting—"

"High Ridge, or that fortress by the ford north towards Holywell, at the edge of the Dark Forest," said Cerdic.

"Which it seems now is recorded as the Castle of the Wyrm," said Hammond, shifting to note an entry on a parchment offered by his secretary. "Now would any care to guess, whether Ravenna's arms-commander will have invited relief of any such siege as we might lay against them?"

At that there was a moment's hush and a general breath, and the rustle of half the room turning to stare at the other half. Then Cerdic snorted and shook his head.

"Not likely," he said. "What? Betray her reputation so? She'd have slain him if he did."

"I agree," said Geraint. "I should not say they ever respected us enough. Further, my lord, had aid been sought from either place, as neither lie more than two days from here—I would expect to have seen it riding over the horizon by now."

"I would not expect the request, myself." The Duke said. "Nonetheless, as soon as possible, I would have everyone from the camp which has formed along the ridge outside our gates be brought within the protection of these walls, and any still residing in the village invited as well, to come with their goods into the security of the keep." He sighed. "It may at least confuse any who come, or lull them, to see no evidence of either battle, or standing siege. As soon, Count Geraint, I would also have word taken both to the Archbishop's party, and among our own—those who followed us from Hammond, which I think may become Lady Helen's charge—to serve notice that as we are now aware of this possible peril, we may wish to arrange for withdrawal of those who have other places they may withdraw to, to prepare to do so."

"And now," he said, "we must truly see our plans made by nightfall."

-o0o-

"Has all been to your satisfaction, Lord Cian?"

Cian Cerul eyed the stout, pale-haired youth standing at the end of the table.

"You know, I shall say it has been." He considered the last few gilt sugar plums in the dish before him, and the emptied platters of roast meat and savories beyond.

"Well done, young wyrm-lord. You excel in hospitality, and my compliments to your servants. I would not have expected your cook to manage the roasting of an entire ox with such skill, on so little notice."

"Thank you, Master. He has good practice. " He gave Cian a watchful look from beneath snowy lashes. "I indulge every so often at the full moon, when I find the strain of practicing transformation gives one the sharpest appetite."

"Indeed."

Cian rose and drew his coat smooth across his shoulders. _And if you imagine I may be moved to discuss your lack of progress in over a decade of practice, boy, you may disabuse yourself of _that_ idea._ "I would now meditate a little before your Well of Vision, and then I shall return to the aerie where I came, and sleep the day.

There I will say you farewell at moonrise and," he favoured the youth with a bland smile, "You may observe my own transformation, if it pleases you."

"I should be honoured." The youth's mannered bow was sufficient to conceal his disappointment. _Little enough you stand to learn from it._ "If it pleases, I shall take you now to our Well, which lies in a grotto beneath the keep."

-o0o-

"Fed, of all things, by a stream dug from the Great Well of the Rift," he said later. He cast a second glance around the dim-lit glow of the cavern, and smiled more generously at Orrin's image in the pool of silvered water before him. "How typical of a wyrm-rank, to seek communion with the sources of our magic underground. How futile." He settled comfortably cross-legged before the well. "Now, what have you to tell me?"

"Your kin have been summoned, Master, and will do as you bid. Lord Lorcan will be here when you return. Except for him, they are confused, but Rogier says all are ready to do as you command."

"Good." He considered the young Sidhe's image a moment. "Your own efforts?"

"Fruitless." Orrin shook his head. "I cannot see within those castle walls, my lord, any more than yesterday. Whatever prevents me is no spell of Ravenna's. It has its own force. My sense is also that it moves, and shields the new Queen."

"Then it is either some aspect of her own power, or someone is protecting her." Cian tapped the stones beside him. "Well, my own viewing from above suggests the same. We will not penetrate those walls with magic."

"Have you sought among those outside the walls?" Orrin leaned forward. "We were able to _see_, there..."

"Oh, yes!" Cian waved a dismissing hand. "Yes, my Orrin, and never met such a patchwork of nonsense. What is known of the girl is too distorted, beyond she is the last king's daughter, and has killed Ravenna, but by what means no one is certain. All anyone can say is despite the Black Queen's best efforts she rose from the dead, that she was chosen and so could not die."

"The usual form of a saviour legend, among mortals" Orrin said. "What will you do now, my lord?"

Cian smiled. "I think I must go in my mortal skin, to meet her."

* * *

_Now is the winter of our discontent made an at least tolerable spring, by finally getting this chapter DONE...and all the gods, a few Sidhe and one nasty old were-beast willing, it will not take anything like so long to get Chapter 10 in the bag._

_If there any words anyone finds particularly cryptic, PM me and I'll add them to the glossary which probably should be here! _


	10. Ch 10 - Alarums and Excursions

**Chapter 10 - Alarums and Excursions (Revision 1)**

Waiting would always be the hardest part, Snow White considered, and drove the blade of her digging knife harder into the knot of weeds in front of her. Waiting, unknowing and unable to know. Not what she might hope for, which hopes must be lost, or how long she must wait - and in the meanwhile, for the peace of everyone around her, needing to appear as serene as possible.

She dragged the clump of earth towards her and rolled the heel of her hand into it. Shook it, thumped it hard into the worked ground beside her, and tossed its tangled remains into the basket Alys had brought.

She had begun the day standing on the battlements above the gatehouse, watching the line of carts and wagons, some drawn by horses and others oxen, and the scattering of laden pack horses and mules among them, drawing away along the road towards the west. Some she knew were bound for Hammond's castle, bearing home those injured who were fit for travel. Most were of the Archbishop's party, returning to the abbey at Llyswennod Cross. And among them, three would be the carts bearing Anna and the women from the fens village. They were returning home with their menfolk, and with them now, Eric. She had thought for a moment she had seen him walking, tall and brown in his long hooded leather coat, beside a man in a green felt hat who might have been Jeff.

She would tell herself she had seen him, and that it was good. He was with friends, and wouldn't be alone.

She would tell herself the same was true for her.

He _was_ right, she must now let others have their chance to be her friends as well. Just harder when so few of those she was beginning to feel might be - well. Either they weren't there, or would have little time for her, for the time being.

"I am sending riders to each of Carmarthen and Carreg Mawr, in search of William," Duke Hammond had told her on Saturday, when they had met after early Mass. "In the face of what we know now, I would have him begin our plans to strike at High Ridge and north into the hills as soon as we may."

She had nodded and said only, "I hope they will find him soon."

Mark and Michael had already ridden out at dawn that day. When the patrol from along the road west had returned late on Friday with Ravenna's courier returned from High Ridge a captive, Mark had offered within the hour that he should mount in the guise of another such man, and return to bear false tidings to that fortress. First that all was now well, then that for two more days all should hold where they were, while the Queen swept her lands with the magic she deemed fit to cleanse them of a rebel remnant.

"That should frighten them fittingly," he had said, and grinned. "I shall enjoy the sport."

"Not too much," she had replied, and faced his smile in silence. "Do not risk yourself by it, Sir Mark."

When the men sent north returned later, with the body of a second courier slung over his horse's back, Michael had offered similar service for the Castle of the Wyrm.

She shook the earth from another fluffed clump of roots. By then, she could hardly have pleaded any preference they stay for her. Not when her own duty for the next month now lay solidly within the castle walls.

That had come clear on Friday, once she had at last been able to ask Duke Hammond again, what she might do next.

When he had for a moment only stared at her, she had continued, "I will not be told there is nothing! but in the face of all this, I have no sense of what I may best do now."

He had gazed aside at the cluttered surface of his worktable, then swung back to her. "The first thing we need is your portrait."

"My _portrait?_" She had followed as he beckoned to Master Ambrose, still working from his ladder on the map that hung above them.

"Master Ambrose!" He waited for the artist to climb down and join them. "I would have an image made of Her Majesty. Something we may print as a woodcut, small enough to conceal in a pouch or pocket or between the pages of a book of hours. I would have one for each of the men we shall now send to raise resistance in her name." He considered her, and went on, "Seated, crowned—in your armour, if you would—holding your sword before you." He looked at Ambrose. "Might you do it by this evening?"

"Yes, my lord" said Master Ambrose. He smiled at Snow White. "If I might have Your Majesty sit a quarter hour, I can make a sketch which will serve. It will take some hours to carve the block, but if I may have until morning, I expect we may have pressed as many copies as you would like."

"How much longer would it take, for a better portrait?" asked Lady Helen, who had followed them close. "Not in armour, and coloured."

"An hour, which need not be all at once,"Ambrose replied. "Or indeed Your Majesty beyond the first quarter hour, if we may find a maid to wear your dress, and sit in the same manner for the rest of it."

Helen cast the Duke a wary glance. "Might we then have that copied, by you or any other, a dozen or so times?"

Master Ambrose nodded. "Certainly."

"But why? And why so many?" Snow White asked.

"Lady Helen is planning in advance of our need," said Hammond. He met Helen's look and shook his head. "Not before Midsummer, my lady. Not before Lammas, if I can prevent it. Until then, we have better uses for our Queen's attention."

"I do not think we have so long," said Helen.

"As you have said before now."

Snow White had looked from the one to the other. "There seems to be a discussion here in which I have an interest, of which I know nothing. Would either of you care to make it clear to me?"

Hammond drew himself up and breathed a sigh. "As mistress of your household, Lady Helen would know how soon it must face the scrutiny of those courts which will be interested in your at last having come to power." He gave Helen a quelling frown. "For now, I prefer we concentrate on matters which will give that power it greater substance."

"We must not be judged slow to proclaim her accessession abroad, through fear of any seeming weakness." Helen folded her arms. "Your Majesty, we are scarce a week past May Day, and I will be surprised if word of everything done here does not reach London by Whitsun, and every court from there to Lisbon by Midsummer."

She eyed Hammond sideways, and rushed on. "By then, Your Majesty, I would see letters prepared to every court in Christendom that matters, and emissaries chosen to take them—under your seal, and each bearing a suitable portrait—and have them ready to leave as soon as we may think rumour is on its way!" Her gaze fixed square on Snow White. "I would at least have it open to question, if our word of you comes behindhand to rumour, whether it is any matter of our having lacked confidence in our ability to hold your throne secure."

She had set her hands to the edge of the table then, and thought, then nodded.

"That seems reasonable," she had said, "so I would have letters and portrait and as much set in readiness as we may do. Then we will give you, my Lord Duke, as many weeks as we may feel safe in doing, and so,"—tilting her head to eye him sidelong—"I return to my question. What 'better uses' may I serve from now to then?"

"Those of making up for lost time," he had said. "We must prepare you, Your Majesty, to be known as Queen. We must make you seem as near complete in all the learning which should have been yours, if nothing of the past twelve years' misery had ever happened. As poised and polished in your graces, able in receiving all who come before you, and clear in understanding both the powers and limits of your birthright. What it must bear, and who and what will oppose you."

"And this all by Whitsun? Or at best by Midsummer?" On reflection now, she could not be sure either had grasped the humour in her tone, past the surprise in her face. Or the horror, though she thought she had held herself still enough, for that to be uncertain.

But she would hardly have had them think her unwilling, and so she had then said quietly, "Where shall I begin?"

"History!" Count Cerdic rumbled, from his place by the end of the worktable. "Start with our neighbours these past fifty years. All you can understand of their interests as they have weighed against ours, and shall weigh against yours to come."

"As much as you can learn of reading and writing—at the least, to sign your name with grace." The Duke sighed. "Then enough of Latin and French spoken, that you may not be confused by what you will encounter of both, once your court begins to receive foreign emissaries."

She had nodded and collected herself, considering him. "Have you anyone to tutor me in these?"

He had nodded then, too. "We have clerks who can aid you."

"Brother Robin," said Helen. "The archivist from Llyswennod Cross, my lord Duke, has been here below us in the library since this morning, and I can think of no better to advise Her Majesty." She had smiled at Snow White then, brightly. "Especially in the matters of history. I swear he knows every scrap of court gossip from here to Muscovy for the past hundred years, and he has an unerring sense for where the bodies are buried."

"So much at the least," murmured Hammond. "For the history, I would suggest we also include those of your women who will be nearest you the most, that they may be the better able to protect you."

"Protect me? From who?" She had stared at him again in puzzlement, and he had frozen for a breath.

"From any who may seek to take advantage of your...inexperience." He had turned away a little, his expression growing troubled. "Your Majesty, might we speak a little more privately?"

"Yes," she had said, and gestured him to the stone bench below the nearest windows.

"I wish I could call it too early to speak this," he had said when they were seated, "but I will not do you the disservice of pretending you need not be aware of it."

"Of what?"

He met her eyes, grave. "Have you given any thought to what may happen if we fail, in any of what we have planned?"

She had shaken her head. "My lord Duke, I have scarce given thought to having won what we have!"

"By summer," he said, "I will hope to bring enough of your lands secure under your rule, to make it clear the rest must follow. That way our neighbours will not come seeking to seize this land by force, though they may still attempt it through legalism...and will undoubtedly seek it through you.

"I will not be surprised if every noble house from here to Italy, if they have a prince to offer, will not send first their ambassadors, and then their sons, to offer you alliance."

"I have no thought of marrying!"

He had nodded again, and his eyes fell to his clasped hands.

"It would not be my will that you do other than choose for yourself," he said, "but if we cannot muster sufficient force to take back your realm before summer is done, you may need to consider what prince can offer you the strength to do it.

"We may need you to lay your hand in the balance, to save your people as only a Queen may do."

"My hand - in marriage."

He had looked round at her again. "I cannot promise today that it will not be needful to invite the most dangerous of those arrayed against you to woo you in peace, and accept being won." A sigh, and again his gaze slipped. "It could be the only way to preserve your birthright for your children."

"By compromising my own rights as queen regnant?" He had only nodded, and in dismay she had pushed up. Turned away, all but fast enough to tangle herself in her skirts. "I am not ready to consider such a thing!

"I was born to be Queen of this land, granting no man more than my consort – Your Grace, I will have to think on this!" He had risen to follow her, and at his step she had faced him again. "Having lost so much of my life to now, I cannot imagine how I should even begin to prepare for that!"

"I wish it were not so." He had spread his hands. "Your Majesty, I do not think there is any way to prepare for that, beyond what you must do anyway."

She had eyed him, wary. "So in a month, you are telling me – "

He shook his head minutely. "A month before we must lay all before the world. Between one and three, before we face its response." He had touched her arm then, his expression not unkind. "Understand, Your Majesty, we shall do all to keep such a choice from being laid before you! but if it must be, I expect it by Lammas."

"Then I think," she had said in a stifled voice, "it is time to introduce me to Brother Robin."

She paused now, palms flat on the stone border framing the bed.

She could not, in fact, regret Brother Robin. She must have had someone like him, in any case. A tall, sleek, stout monk with a brisk and unexpectedly cheerful manner, he had had a workplace made for her in the library within the hour of Helen's introducing them, and at once begun to question her about everything she knew. By dinner-time he had set her exercises both in reading from the store of maps available, and practicing both her letters and a signature, and had tested everything she remembered - enough, it seemed, to impress him - of every story she had ever been told of her own ancestors, or of the kings of England, Scotland, or Dál Riada, or any of the Welsh or Irish princes. Some he had dismissed as more legends than fact, but most of the wilder stories he had not only confirmed, but elaborated with specific and breezy mischief.

This afternoon though, when she had begun to stumble over the short texts he had set her to read aloud from an herbal, he had regarded her with new severity and told her to stop. If she were any of his novices, he had said, he would by now have ordered her to go and plant turnips or some such thing, to refresh her attention.

"What you are engaged in here is principally an exercise of your mind, to which you are not used," he had said, "and not faulting your efforts, Your Majesty, in my view as your tutor it is time for you to balance it with a measure of exercise for the body, out of doors and in daylight."

"Um. Well..." She had looked down at the page then, collecting herself in thought. "Some of the women are making over my mother's private garden, today," she said. "Clearing its remains - we need a better herb garden for the stillroom."

"A most commendable project!" He had positively beamed. "Then I will recommend you to it for the rest of this afternoon. While you are supporting that effort, I shall have some time to further your curriculum."

-o0o-

"Y'r Majesty, you getting at all tired?"

"Tired?" She looked around as Rose came to take the basket of weeds, then up to where Alys now stood with a large rake, beside her. "No. Just wool-gathering a little."

"Because we could call this done now, far as you're concerned," the young woman said. "This bed only wants raking smooth now, and we don't need you sore in the morning, from all this pounding litter from the soil."

"I'm fine." She pushed straighter. "Do we not still have seedlings to plant?"

"Aye," said Alys, "an' I can have 'em all set an' watered by the time Rose bears yon basket to the dungheap." She tapped the rake handle. "Best thing for it, right here, Majesty. I'll just lay 'em in quickly and tidy behind me as I go."

"I'll trust you know best." Snow White looked around at a murmur of voices from the direction of her chambers. "I suspect I hear my own duties approaching."

She climbed to her feet as Marjorie and Greta came down the shallow steps from the sheltered walkway around the garden, and dusted the loose earth from her gloves.

"Your Majesty," Marjorie said, leading the way to her, "it will be supper-time shortly, and Lady Helen says you are to meet later with His Grace the Duke and the Archbishop."

"I am," said Snow White. "Planning the tax census."

"Would it please you to dress more as Queen, for the occasion?" Marjorie held out her hand for the gloves. "We've finished remaking that green dress for you, if you'd wish it." She hesitated when Snow White gave a sigh. "I know it must feel a trial, my lady, but you know it will lift everyone's spirits to see you at dinner looking the part."

"More so than a raggedy boy in hose?"

Marjorie lifted an eyebrow. "No boy, with that hair! More a woodsprite, and not an undraggled one!"

"Make me a new costume not ripped short with an ax, and we may instead change the fashion," Snow White said. "For the moment, I'll give you the green for dinner."

She swept up her wide-brimmed straw hat from the side of the path and passed it to Greta, as her handmaid had now collected her gloves from Marjorie. "Thank you. Alys. It would seem I am done, and - " she looked up, tensing, as the air rang with something between the fading chime of a bell, and the plucking of a harp-string. "What in the world is_ that?_"

The sound came again, a deeper note more felt than heard, that seemed to swirl almost tangible, invisible, like a wide loop of fabric sheeting up, around and above them, and she gasped as both sound and light dimmed and deadened. Marjorie's questioning murmur cut off, and Rose's squeak of alarm deepened so that she spun to look. Saw as she moved, Alys recoil and freeze in mid-turn, lips parted, hands still clasped round the handle of her rake.

"Alys?—Marjorie? " She slipped a step back fast, out of the circle they had made around her, staring as each woman's motion slowed to stillness. Alys' turning, Marjorie's gasp, and behind her, Greta had leaned forward a little, to stare with wide eyes towards the garden's entrance.

-o0o-

In the royal library, Brother Robin started at the slow, resonant sound of something heavy, ringing against brass. Beside him, his friends Father Mick and lay brother Matthew looked up from the volume they were examining.

"What's that, then?" Mick asked. "You got a _gong_ in here somewhere, Brother?"

"Not that I know!" Still holding down the page, Robin turned as the sound came again. Not quite a gong, though. He could all but feel the vibration in his teeth, at the third strike. "The only thing like that - " He checked, facing the aisle leading into the deeper stacks. "The Queen's _mirror?_"

-o0o-

In the shadows of the garden's arched gate, something was moving. A shifting, a twist in air that seemed briefly to mist, and sparkle, and Snow White ducked to pull the knife from her boot. Came up on guard as shadow became the form of a tall man walking towards them.

Tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and no one she knew. Not armed that she could see, but would she see? She gripped the knife tighter and stepped into the path facing him. Reached to touch Marjorie's arm as she passed. "Marjorie, Greta—indoors! if you can, and Alys and Rose, go with them!"

"They cannot hear you," said the intruder in a mild voice. He walked into the faded light around them, and it brightened, and she shifted into a careful guard, at which he smiled. "Neither can your guards, for this moment."

"Can they not?" She held her position. "Am I to think you're a friend, if that's true?"

"Only careful," he said. "I am not moved to quarrel with any of your guardians, over my claim to so slight a visit."

She studied him. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

-o0o-

In the alley past the last rank of bookshelves, the mirror still stood sidelong beneath its drape, but when he laid his hand upon it, Robin could feel a vibration like an echo of its pulse. They could not now doubt it the source of the sound, though at his first, uncertain step into the alley, it had ceased to ring. It only stood now, vibrating in the soft aftermath of it. Almost seeming to _quiet_ as he gripped its edge through the heavy canvas, and that decided him.

"We must have it out!" He dragged at it, rolling it into the narrow aisle, and Father Mick came to help.

-o0o-

Two steps away, she could call him handsome: fine, almost delicate features, light silver-grey eyes, in a face near as pale as her own. Unlike her, though, fair. Lashes and brows dark gold, and his shoulder-length mane of curls mostly lighter, nearer Marjorie's coin-bright colouring, bound back with a fine gold circlet. Young, too - a brow clear and unlined - but then something older shaded his expression, in the breath before he smiled. His dress was unusual, too: a close-fitting coat and trews in shimmering cream, high boots in pale leather, a long, snowy shirt heavy with gold embroidery, and not a speck of dust on any of it.

His smile drew wider at her inspection.

"I wanted to see you." A firm, precise voice, smooth as heavy satin. "The new Queen, who has freed me from the old one."

"From Ravenna?" Snow White frowned. "What, by killing her? How were you bound, that that should free you?" He made no move beyond watching her, and she shifted nearer, holding her guard. "Who _are_ you?"

-o0o-

In the main aisle there was room to drag off its covering and stand it against the wall, and then all fall back, shivering with it, at the play of lights and colour within its reflecting surface. A surface, Robin saw, no longer reflecting anything. It was glowing with its own light in which shapes moved, and the whole seemed to sweep round and swoop, and dive, in a way that all but undid his stomach.

"Strewth!" said Mick. He caught Robin's sleeve and pulled him so that they did not stand directly before it. "Matt, an' Henry, you keep back!" He reached for the cross that hung from his belt. "That an' pray we'll have nothing coming _out _of that—

"Though as it's a _mirror_," he added, a moment later, "it should be more likely to just _show_ us something."

-o0o-

"So many questions," he said, and Snow White felt an edge cut beneath his lazy tone. "You may call me Tiarna na cinn Ársa, and as for how I was bound, it was through Ravenna's _geasa_." Something hardened in his expression. "Only her death could serve to break them."

"So you knew she was dead," she said.

He nodded. "When I first woke, after the thing was done."

_And so who else now knows?_ "I know a duke who won't be happy to hear that." He tilted his head in brief question, and she shifted a step nearer. "So what does that make us? Are you now bound to me?"

He did smile, sweet and brilliant, at that. "No. Only curious."

She relaxed her guard only a little. "So now that you see me, is your curiosity satisfied?"

"No, I will say not." He now shifted a step as though to walk round her, and it was her turn to follow, to keep them facing. "You are fair and sweet, oh Queen, and belike will soon be sweeter, but you must be more, to have proven Ravenna's match." He stopped. "I would ask you a question, and trade you three answers for one."

-o0o-

"It's a _garden_," said Robin. "Within these walls, by the stonework." He went to look closer, as the image - certainly an image, now, and an effort to show them something, though as it seemed, through an obscuring mist - grew clearer in the mirror's surface. "There's someone _there_…"

"Something's not right," said Father Mick, following him. "D'ye see it? Those women aren't moving right."

"They're not moving at all!" said Matthew. "Only the two men, Father." He and Henry came closer, too, and he pointed, and Robin drew a sharp breath and stared round at him, as it seemed the view shifted with his words.

"An' I see no fire, but does that not look like smoke, about them?" Henry put in.

"Whatever 'tis, it's trying to get closer," said Mick. "Y'think it heard ye, Matt?"

"Couldn't say, Father."

Robin looked back to find the mirror's view was indeed pulling closer, and clearer even through the clouding – smoke, if that was what it was – and said, "Oh, no!" He caught Mick's arm. "Oh God, my God, Father, that's the Queen!"

"The smaller one? With that knife she's got out?" Mick peered at the image and he let go, feeling himself begin to shake.

"It's her garden, the one where she is right now," he said. He stared round, urgent, at the library doors. "And I've never seen that man before, and she's got her knife out – stay and keep watch, I must get the guards!"

-o0o-

"A trade of true answers, like one of the Fair Folk might offer?" He blinked, and she kept moving. "Is that what you are?"

"That would leave you two questions, if you accept the bargain."

"I don't!" She stopped, waited. "You've cast some spell here, Lord Tiarna. Release it, and I may consider it."

"Release it, that your arcane guardian may fall upon me?" He drew another step closer, his expression appraising, and she stepped aside again, still keeping herself between him and her women.

"That would be your one question, if I accepted the bargain."

"I deny it," he said. "You are not bound to answer anything, until I say I ask. He took another circling step around her, a faint frown touching his expression when she again moved with him. "It is not you who darkens my sight within these walls, and I shall not seek to cross such a power until I understand it. Are you not curious, to know what you are?"

"I know _who_ I am," she said. "I am my father's daughter and rightful Queen of this land - and if my defeat of Ravenna has released you from bondage, I think you owe me better than this game."

He turned aside, then looked back at her. "What I would ask, is what Ravenna did to you."

"Past murdering my father? She locked me in a cell at the top the highest tower on the outer wall, and left me there for eleven years alone, the most part in darkness."

"Hung between earth and sky, in a chamber of stone." His gaze was measuring. "And you did not die there."

"Until she decided to kill me. Until her brother came and said she would have my beating heart - to _eat_, as I gathered later."

"_Ahhh_," he said, and drew back, and regarded her now with eyes shining in mischief. "That tells me much of what your powers could be."

"What, that I do not know?"

His smile at that was bright enough to make her insides tighten. "Then you accept the bargain." He raised a hand, forefinger extended, and she drew a breath, and nodded. "I can tell you or I can show you, in a way that will tell us both more."

She gave him her own measuring look. "What will it cost me?"

"Your second question," he said. "I give you my word, no more than one comfortably deep breath."

"Show me, then." _And pray I don't regret this impulse..._

He reached into a fold of his coat, drew out a gold disk the size of his palm, and snapped it with a gesture into a shallow, gleaming bowl. He held it out to her. "Take this, and a handful of earth, and take any shred of root-stuff you like, from your servant's basket."

She shifted closer to take it from him, then edged back, careful. Amusement tugged at his lips, but he made no move as she dipped the bowl – cup, she saw now, formed from a seamless spiral of metal – quickly into the soft earth of the bed, and pulled it up. She balanced it in the hand still holding her knife, long enough to pull a tuft of rootlets from Rose's basket, and held it out to him.

"Will this do?"

He considered it, nodded. "Yes. That is woodlily, it will serve."

"Fold it into the soil," he went on, "then take up that watering pot I see soaking in its bucket. Draw that one deep breath named as your price, and as you pour the water upon it...blow out the breath upon both soil and water, and wish all blessèd be."

"Blessèd as in the witch's blessing?"

"Or a fairy's, one might say. Nothing to render your soul darker, in either case." He held out his hand towards the water, and shrugged at her silent look.

Decided, she thrust the knot of pale roots into the cup, folded the earth over it, and went to get the pot. A thumb pressed over its opening held the water in as she drew it up, and drew in her breath with it. She turned, not to lose sight of Tiarna as she did so, and released the water with the breath.

"Blessèd be water, soil, and lily root," she said, and he dipped his head in approval. "Now what?"

"Breathe again, and watch."

She set down the pot in its bucket, bore the cup back into her free hand, and gasped again, as something shifted beneath the damp earth. Watched, as with a shivering and a soft warming in the bright metal, a cluster of bright green points broke the soil. Thick needles of green pushed higher, a hands'-breadth and then two, unfurling as they came, into broad leaves. From the base of each a stalk thrust upwards, loaded with small, pale green buds, which swelled and broke, and each retreated to reveal a delicate blood-red bell.

"Lord Tiarna," she said, and gazed up into Tiarna's intent face, and deliberately did not startle. "Are woodlily bells not _white_?"

"Red as the fires of passion, this day." He drew a sigh, and she felt his breath, warm, brush her cheek. How, even in wonder, had she had missed his drawing so near? "Splendid, oh Queen, beyond my expectations..." Again that sweet smile lit his face. "Oh, _foolish_ Ravenna! To have denied the Lady all in her domain, except a maid as Her avatar."

"Her _what?_" she asked. "I don't know that word."

"_Avatar_." Shouts came, muffled, from beyond the wall, and he lifted his head. "Ask your priests, they will know the word." Silvered grey eyes met hers again. "Now I think we are discovered, and I owe you still an answered."

"I can't think what to ask!" She stared at the flowers, then again at him. "What were you, Lord Tiarna, to Ravenna? Or else what was she to you?—and where does any of it leave you and I, now?" She held up her hand before he could speak. "No! Wait! I think my question must be, shall I call you my enemy, now?"

"Yours at present, no." His hand brushed hers, beneath the rim of the cup. "I shall come to you again at the new moon, that we may speak of what shall be. For now, let us say only that if you would call me by my rank, it is not 'Lord', but 'Prince'." He swept her knife hand aside, and smiling, laid a fingertip against her brow. "My blood is royal as your own."

"Wh?!" She would have sprung back at the touch, but he was gone. "What?!"

She whirled as the air brightened, and the others' voices rose behind her. "Your Majesty! - _my lady - _" Marjorie in tones of panic, "_Where is she?!_" and Greta still wide-eyed, turning her one-handed, "_There_, Lady Marjorie!" before pulling her sleeve to her eyes. Between them Rose stood staring still, and Alys, her face startled, completed her turn.

"How'd you get _there?_" Alys demanded, then remembered herself, and bobbed something approaching a curtsey. "Y'r Majesty!"

"You didn't see him!" Snow White said, and spun again, knife upraised, as two guardsmen pounded through the archway, others crowding behind them. "And _you_ didn't see him either, did you?!"

"See - who, Your Majesty?" said the first. His sword raised in guard, he circled swiftly around them. "Spread out, men - search the passage walk!" He came to face her. "We've seen no one, not as we came."

"Brother Robin, in the library, told us someone was here," gasped another, "He said there was a stranger, an' you'd your knife drawn, the mirror had shown it!"

"_Seen_ it - " Snow White sheathed her knife, and straightened. "In the _mirror_. Right." Past a sudden urge to shake, she blew out a breath and turned back to her women. "Next stop's the library. Marjorie and Greta with me - _and you__,_ sirs, surely! - and one each of your men with Alys, and Rose, run to the Duke's quarters and the great hall, and ask in my name that he come, and any of the dwarves who may be found."

* * *

_Chapter 11 – Still 'enter the Mirror'. 'Nuff said._

* * *

_**Glossary**_

This round, we're getting into the calendar.

**Whitsun** \- In our world, the festival of Pentecost, which takes place 7 weeks after Easter. Approximately May 27th this year, in this AU.

**Lammas** \- First of the harvest festivals, in this AU, roughly synchronized with the festival of Lughnasadh in the first week of August.

And a **clerk**, in this era, is a scholar, often monastic, by any other name.

* * *

_A final word about the title change..._

It's been bugging me for a while that my original title for this story, "_The Long Road Home_", turns out to be not only the title of more than one legitimately published novel out there, but of more than one fanfiction as well - the only mercy being, that at least none of those other fanfics have turned up in 'my' particular archive! Any road, I finally got bugged enough to change it. "_High Roads and Low_" may or may not spoil a little of where I plan to have some of my characters travelling, but in the end I think it'll fit as well.

Still writing!


End file.
